Random Thoughts Escaping

“There’s Just a Hole Where the Pilots Usually Sit!”

2012-02-01T09:16:00.000-05:00

So, after Airport, the kiddo and I decided it was worthwhile to continue on through the franchise. Airport 1975, released in the fall of 1974, stars Charlton Heston (and his eyebrows), with George Kennedy reprising his role as Joe Patroni. Where Patroni was the chief mechanic in the original, he’s now been promoted to Vice President of Operations for Columbia Airlines. Naturally, Heston’s Alan Murdock, Columbia’s Chief Flight Instructor, is involved with Karen Black’s Nancy Pryor, the head stewardess on the imperilled flight.

There was some groovy dialog, but no knocked up stewardesses or cheating husbands in this one. In fact, whereas in the first movie the people in danger didn’t necessarily have strong connections with the folks on the ground trying to save them, in this installment not only is Murdock’s lover on the flight, but so is Patroni’s wife (played by Webster’s mom – Susan Clark!) and son (not played by Emmanuel Lewis, I’m sorry to report).

Amping up the tension is Linda Blair in her first post-Exorcist role, on board as a child in need of a kidney transplant. Thankfully, she is soothed by Helen Reddy’s singing nun character, Sister Ruth.

The pop culture cavalcade continues with Erik Estrada as the doomed flight engineer, Myrna Loy as an alcoholic passenger continually hit on by Sid Caesar’s nervous chatterbox. Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller, and Conrad Janis play three buddies on the transcontinental flight. In an excellent meta role, Gloria Swanson plays herself, and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who my generation knows as Remington Steel leading lady Stephanie Zimbalist’s real-life dad and lead character Remington Steel’s on-screen dad, plays the one surviving flight crew member.

Columbia Airlines flight 409 takes off from Washington Dulles International Airport, headed for Los Angeles. The west coast is “socked in” so the flight is rerouted to Salt Lake City International Airport. Simultaneously, a businessman takes off in a private Beechcraft from New Mexico headed for Boise, Idaho, but is also routed to Salt Lake. After both planes are stacked into their approach patters over Utah, the businessman suffers a heart attack and crashes into the cockpit of the Bowing 747. Tragedy ensues.

There are problems with the autopilot, and the obvious dearth of qualified pilots on board the commercial flight leads Murdock and Patroni to take the company jet to Salt Lake, where they hope to somehow find a way to help the crippled craft safely to the ground. After enduring plenty of sexist banter from the flight crew before the disaster, Pryor capably assumes control of the plane with very few woman-in-peril moments, and those clearly serve to ratchet up the tension.

At one point, a TV news crew shows up at the Salt Lake airfield with the widow of the businessman. Similar to the social commentary of the noise pollution subplot in the first movie, this brief aside clearly takes aim at the sensationalization of news but isn’t long enough to gain any traction.

Ultimately, Murdock and Patroni enlist the help of a nearby air base and attempt an in-flight transfer of a pilot from an Air Force helicopter into the flight deck through the gaping hole. Like the “oh, shit” moment when the passenger detonates his bomb in the lavatory of the plane in the first movie, the kiddo and I had the same reaction during the Air Force pilot’s attempt to board flight 409 in this movie.

Ultimately, the plane is safely landed, the inflatable emergency exit slides are deployed, everyone makes it off the plane, and an ambulance is waiting to rush Linda Blair to the hospital for her kidney (apparently they found a replacement kidney in Utah, since the one she was scheduled to receive was in Los Angeles). On the other side of the plane, Pryor and her pilot hero are able walk off the plane and onto a waiting mobile ramp stairs, preserving their dignity.

Although I’d never seen Airport or Airport 1975 prior to this past weekend, I love the movie Airplane. I haven’t seen it in years, but I can quote it ad nauseam. And now, having seen these two disaster classics, the parody’s reference points are all the more amusing.

After watching the second installment in the Airport franchise, the kiddo declared he knows what the calamity will be in Airport ’77: “Since the first movie had a hole blown in the rear of the plane, and this one had a hole blown in the cockpit, I bet in the next movie there’s a hole blown in the middle of the plane!” We’ll see. I’m just happy that when he finally gets around to watching Airplane, he’s going to get so much more out of it than I did for the first 30 years.

“Hold On, We’re Goin’ for Broke!”

2012-01-30T08:43:00.002-05:00

I watched the 1970 classic Airport for the first time this weekend. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the granddaddy of all disaster movies, but think I got my money’s worth. The movie is over 40 years old, so reader beware... spoiler-iffic details to follow.

Taking place over a single night, Burt Lancaster’s Mel Bakersfeld is the manager of Lincoln International Airport outside of Chicago, trying to keep the airport open and functioning during a paralyzing snowstorm. He’s also in a loveless marriage and clearly taken with Trans Global Airlines’ PR agent, Jean Seberg’s Tanya Livingston.

Bakersfeld’s brother-in-law is Dean Martin’s TGA pilot Vern Demerest. Demerest is cheating on his wife (Bakersfeld’s sister) with head stewardess Gwen, played by a luminous Jacqueline Bisset. We find out Gwen is pregnant with Demerest’s child, and there is talk of how to deal with the situation, including adoption versus abortion – a pretty dicey topic in the pre-Roe v. Wade years.

So not only are the two main characters cheating on their wives – one in his heart and one literally – both end up with their mistresses in the final moments of the film’s happy ending. The portrayal of Bakersfeld's wife justifies his ending up with Tanya, but you can’t help but feel bad for his sister. Demerest is cheating on her and leaves her for his pregnant girlfriend. That's just cold.

My ten-year-old son watched the movie with me. The abortion talk was subtle enough that it went over his head, but he was astounded that the two men ended up with different women at the end of the movie. Mel’s wife complains throughout that he’s married to his job and doesn’t make time for her (but it was pretty ridiculous for her to bitch about it on this particular night when there was an obvious environmental calamity and a terrorist threat on one of the flights that, as airport manager, he has to deal with). At the end of the movie, however, when Mel declines to deal with a new problem that’s come up at the airport and literally drives off into the sunrise with Tanya, the kiddo turned to me and said, “Why didn’t he do that with his wife? They’d probably still be together!”

There are a couple of passengers on the flight with Demerest and Gwen, originating at Lincoln International and heading to Rome, Italy, that play key roles in the film. Helen Hayes won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of elderly stowaway Ada Quonsett, and Van Heflin played bomber D.O. Guerrero. There was some nice comic relief with Hayes’ character, and a melodramatic-but-story-propelling turn by Heflin.

The all-star cast was awesome, and extended to the ever-reliable George Kennedy (the only actor to reprise his role through all four of the Airport movies), Maureen Stapleton as Guerrero’s wife (whose performance is actually more deserving of the Supporting Actress Oscar nod than Hayes’ turn), Barbara Hale as Mel’s sister and Vern’s wife, a young Gary Collins as the second officer on the disaster plagued flight, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them uncredited appearances by Marion Ross and Christopher Lloyd.

Not only does the flick overflow with recognizable actors, it has an overabundance of story crammed in there! Along with the snowstorm, bomb threat, and romantic plot points, there are subplots involving picketers, airport noise pollution (while it may have provided some social commentary on the times, it falls flat), and a plane stuck in the snow on the airfield's longest runway.

Crazy to think that Airport started the disaster film craze of the ’70s. It was two hours and 16 minutes of slow burn story evolution that can easily veer into camp, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it... so much so that I've already moved on to the first sequel!

Just Shy of a Train Wreck

2012-01-27T08:54:00.004-05:00

Ryan Adams
25 January 2012: Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

Back in the early 2000s, Tracy and I used to go to Borders after dinner-and-a-movie date nights. We’d wander through the books and CDs, often finding new music to thrill us. It was on one of those late night excursions that I discovered Ryan Adams. The cover of Gold caught my eye, which led me to a listening station, which led me to buying the disc on the strength of the first two tracks alone – “New York, New York” and “Firecracker”.

Fast forward a decade, and Adams’ prolific output is as challenging as his personality is reported to be. Of the 13 albums he’s released, Gold is still my favorite, but I like Heartbreaker, Love Is Hell, Cardinology (with his backing band the Cardinals), and his new album Ashes & Fire all quite a bit. I’ve wanted to see Adams live for years, but he always seemed to be just off my radar enough that I would miss a ticket sale or sometimes the fact that he was in town altogether.

I was telling my friend Kristin about the Black Keys show coming up in March, and she mentioned the Ryan Adams show she’d picked up tickets for. I immediately went to see about getting tickets and realized the show was sold out. Kristin then told me her husband wasn’t all that interested in going to the show and offered the extra ticket to me. I wasn’t going to pass that opportunity up – especially since I knew Kristin had seen Adams with the Cardinals on an earlier tour and raved about the show.

After some preshow drinks and noshing across the street, we headed into the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square. I can’t remember the last time I was in the Ohio, and I had certainly forgotten how tiny the venue is. Holding an even thousand seats, it’s the second smallest house in the district. A former Loew’s movie theatre, the Ohio retained that quality during Adams’ intimate show. It was as though everyone was afraid to talk. It seemed mostly born out of respect for Adams and his music, but it lent a bizarre quality to the night. It was pin-drop quiet during songs. (I even heard someone “shushed” by another concertgoer at one point!) The atmosphere reminded me a lot of seeing Cowboy Junkies at the Phantasy Nightclub back in the ’80s, or Jake Shimabukuro at The Stage Door a few years back.

The upside to the atmosphere was seeing how Adams dazzles alone on stage, capably backing himself on piano or acoustic guitar and harmonica. His voice was strong and his personality even more so. The banter between performer and fan was sometimes awkward, but the blame for that lay entire at the feet of the audience. Not quite heckling, but clearly as restless as Adams in an ADHD sort of way, there were moments when it felt like the show might go completely off the rails. That fine line elevated the night, highlighting the reworked catalogue of hits into even darker territory, balanced and softened by Adams’ humble and playful acknowledgements of just how low-key the set list was, and humorous improvisations of songs about cats, an epic a cappella drum solo, and a tune about Danzig and hookers.

The song selection was bookended by “Oh My Sweet Carolina” and “Come Pick Me Up”, both off of Adams’ Heartbreaker debut. In between, there were plenty of highlights in the two-hour, nearly two-dozen song set. Reworking Gold’s “The Rescue Blues”, “Sylvia Plath”, and “New York, New York” on piano was stunning. The title track and “Dirty Rain” off of last year’s Ashes & Fire were just as memorable as his cover of Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and the always amazing “English Girls Approximately”, both off of Love Is Hell.

Short on time and up against an apparent noise ordinance curfew, Adams asked the audience to play along with a faux encore exit a few minutes after 11, and closed the curtain on a wildly entertaining night.

A Mid-’60s Smoker’s Haven

2012-01-25T09:02:00.003-05:00

I remember pipes and pipe racks and ashtrays around the house throughout my childhood. I can still see the vacuum-sealed tobacco canister on the floor by the loveseat and remember my fascination with the uniquely designed mechanism to pop the lid open. There was the rubber change-purse-meets-woopie-cushion styled tobacco pouch on the end table. But more than anything else, I remember the smell of L.L. Bean cherry pipe tobacco. It was the smell of my dad and his clothes. It was the smell of the family room. It was the smell of home.

From sometime around 1964 or ’65, I found this amazing photo of my dad taken at Smokers’ Haven, a specialty tobacconist in Columbus, Ohio. My dad picked up the pipe smoking habit while attending Ohio State University, and continued to smoke until the mid-’90s. He would stop in at Smokers' Haven after he’d left Columbus and moved back to Northeast Ohio – sometimes even making special trips down just to visit the shop.

Smoking sucks. I know that. (And I don’t believe my dad’s pipe smoking had any influence on my eight-year, pack-a-day cigarette smoking habit back in the day.) I remember my sister doing a project for school, maybe in middle school, where she tried to get my dad to quit smoking. She didn’t succeed, and I don’t know why my dad ultimately kicked the habit. I do know that when he did quit he sold his pipe collection and used the money to buy my mom a tennis bracelet. It was years, however, before my mom found out that was where he got the money to buy it for her.

Archiving the Past

2012-01-24T19:00:00.000-05:00

One of my projects for this year is to rescue all my family’s photos, organize them, and scan them into the computer. I say “rescue” because back in the ’80s my parents put our photos into those magnetic photo albums... you know, the kind with the subtly tacky pages that, combined with the static of the plastic overlays, kept your photos in place on the page. Of course, what we didn’t know then is just how damaging those pages are to photo paper. My mom and dad had five large albums with photos arranged primarily in chronological order, beginning with their wedding shower in 1962 and carrying through the mid-’80s. I was able to successfully save all but three of the photos. There was one page that just wouldn’t give up the goods. All the other photos were extracted over the course of a week with varying degrees of success – the most common violation being some portion of the backing paper staying with the album page. They are, however, in good enough condition to be saved and, certainly, to be scanned.

It was a trip for me to just see each and every photo as I liberated them from their albums. The nostalgia factor amped up considerably and nudged my creative juices into overdrive as well. I suspect over the course of the coming months, there will be more than one or two blog entries inspired by the memories evoked or weird associations with the images as I work through the long process of scanning each photo, making any corrections to it in the photo software, and organizing both the digital files and the physical photos for long-term archiving.

I’m fortunate to still have both of my parents around and geographically close for all the obvious reasons, including helping me identify people and places and dates in all these photos. Once I get through this Besenyodi nuclear family era, I will probably ask my parents for the photos that never made it into albums -- those of previous generations and those of the family after my sister and I moved on and made them empty nesters.

The Science of the Seventies

2012-01-23T09:27:00.004-05:00

In the mid-’70s, there were a lot of things wrong in America. There was an oil crisis. Nixon had disgraced the highest office in the land and resigned. And with the end of the Vietnam War, one of the biggest problems our returning GI’s faced was how to “get it all together.” Thankfully, if they were reading comic books, these guys knew the Cleveland Institute of Electronics, Inc. was there to give them the break they needed.

After earning their FCC license from CIE, servicemen were able to sit around dressed in nice suits sharing drinks with pretty blondes, and were so flush with cash they had to keep the extra dough right out on the table in front of them. Now that’s livin’, man.

Digital Deus

2012-01-06T09:27:00.000-05:00

In the three years since publishing Deus ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic Book Fan, I have had a great time connecting and re-connecting with fellow comic fans. I don't know that I realized just how universal my experience was until the book started getting into the hands of others.

Deus has been available for purchase via physical copy or PDF since the beginning through the publisher, Lulu, but the way we consume our pop culture has changed. I love getting a digital copy of a movie when I pick up the Blu-Ray, and I'm all about the subtle moves toward digital copy codes being included with comics. In that spirit, at the end of 2011 I decided to reach out to all of the people who have purchased a copy of Deus ex Comica direct from me over the years (I don’t have access to who purchases the book from the publisher, via Amazon, or elsewhere. Sorry.), and offer them a free digital copy of the book. The response has been overwhelming! I know people love to get free stuff, but the personal notes included with the responses to my offer have been amazing and fun... from providing a reason to reread my book to aiding in the excuse to purchase a tablet!

With such an overwhelming response, it seemed right to extend the offer to all future sales of my book purchased direct from me. So, as of now, anyone who purchases a copy of Deus ex Comica direct from me not only gets the opportunity to have the book inscribed if they'd like, but also will receive a free digital copy of the book for their reading pleasure!

The PDF is still available for purchase if that's the only version you want, but I'm all about getting this thing into as many people's hands -- virtual or otherwise -- as possible. Read it, share it, enjoy it!

Book List 2011

2011-12-31T22:25:00.000-05:00

Non-Fiction

Role Models - John Waters
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean - Susan Casey
Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City - Nelson Johnson
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story - Annabelle Gurwitch and Jeff Kahn
Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir by the Man Who Knew Him Best - Peter Freestone
Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends - Barney Hoskyns
The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
Sit, Ubu, Sit: How I Went from Brooklyn to Hollywood with the Same Woman, the Same Dog, and a Lot Less Hair - Gary David Goldberg
Just A Geek - Wil Wheaton
Nerd Do Well - Simon Pegg
It’s So Easy (And Other Lies) - Duff McKagan
Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny - Nile Rodgers
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution - Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum
Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” - David Bianculli

Fiction

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Star Wars: Fool’s Bargain - Timothy Zahn
Star Wars: Survivor’s Quest - Timothy Zahn
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

Trade Paperbacks and Hardcover Collected Editions

My?tery Society - Steve Niles, Fiona Staples
The Last Days of American Crime - Rick Remender, Greg Tocchini
North 40 - Aaron Williams, Fiona Staples
Chew, Volume 3: Just Desserts - John Layman, Rob Guillory
American Vampire, Volume 1 - Scott Snyder, Stephen King, Rafael Albuquerque
Proof, Book 4: Julia - Alexander Grecian and Riley Rossmo
Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars Omnibus - Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck
Star Wars Adventures: Han Solo and the Hollow Moon of Khorya - Jeremy Barlow
Marvel Essential: X-Men, Volume 5 - Chris Claremont, John Romita, Jr., Barry Windsor-Smith
The Walking Dead, Book Six - Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn
Dead @ 17: The Witch Queen - Josh Howard
Indiana Jones Omnibus: The Further Adventures, Volume 3 - Various
Hellboy, Volume 1: Seed of Destruction - Mike Mignola, John Byrne
Avengers: Hawkeye - Mark Gruenwald
Avengers: West Coast Avengers Assemble - Roger Stern
Thor Omnibus - Walt Simonson
Sweet Tooth, Volume 1: Out of the Woods - Jeff Lemire
Empowered, Volume 2 - Adam Warren
Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition, Book Five - Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra
I Kill Giants: Titan Edition - Joe Kelly
Ghost Rider, Volume 1: Vicious Cycle - Daniel Way
Ghost Rider, Volume 2: The Life & Death of Johnny Blaze - Daniel Way
Ghost Rider, Volume 3: Apocalypse Soon - Daniel Way
Ghost Rider, Volume 4: Revelations - Daniel Way
Ghost Rider Omnibus - Jason Aaron
Marvel Essential: X-Men, Volume 6 - Chris Claremont, John Romita, Jr., Barry Windsor-Smith
All-Ghouls School - Marc Sumerak, David Bryant
Bomb Queen: Woman of Mass Destruction - Jimmie Robinson
Bomb Queen II: Dirty Bomb - Jimmie Robinson
The Uncanny X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga - Chris Claremont and John Byrne
The Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past - Chris Claremont and John Byrne
Marvel Universe vs. The Punisher - Jonathan Mayberry and Goran Parlov
The Homeland Directive - Robert Venditti and Mike Huddleston
Mystique: Ultimate Collection - Brian K. Vaughan
Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine - Jonathan Mayberry and Laurence Campbell
Queen & Country: Definitive Collection, Volume 4 - Greg Rucka
The Walking Dead, Book Seven - Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn

Concert Regrets

2011-11-02T09:23:00.000-04:00

One of the things about learning to brew your own beer from somebody is you better get along with them because that first session takes hours! Thankfully, my first brewing session meant I was able to hang out with my buddy Jeff. Killing time in his garage on a brisk Saturday afternoon in early October, sitting around the kettle as my winter spiced ale brewed, the conversation wandered at that nice, familiar pace that only comes from having been friends for over 20 years. Of course, considering our history, music was a big topic of the day, including concert regrets. I have two concert regrets – not shows I wish I’d never seen, but shows I missed.

My Number One with a Bullet is Roger Waters’ Radio K.A.O.S. tour stop at Blossom Music Center in August of 1987.

It was the summer before my seventeenth birthday, and I was working a couple of jobs, including mowing the lawn at the local community park and busing tables at a crappy restaurant. Up to that point in time, I had only attended two concerts – David Lee Roth the previous fall, and Mötley Crüe earlier in the summer of ’87. I seem to remember it being a combination of my own money management issues and my parents not being all that comfortable with my concert going activities yet as the main reasons I was unable to attend the show. I’m sure the normal teenage notions of independence and arguing with my parents about “freedom” and “space” came into play, too.

I don’t remember who I was even going to go to the show with, but I knew even then that this was a show I really needed to see. And, by all accounts, it was a spectacle. Radio K.A.O.S. wasn’t a huge hit, but it was and still is one of my favorite albums. (I did an in-depth piece on it back when I wrote for PopMatters. You can check that out here.) Waters took DJ Jim Ladd on tour with him, and the show was staged as a giant radio show, complete with phone booths set up around the venue for audience members to “call in” and ask questions. Of course, it was never filmed and the likes of it will never be seen again, but, man, I think it would have been amazing.

Of course, a month or so after the Roger Waters show, I did see Boston at the Richfield Coliseum. I’m sure my parents’ fears and my money woes were cast aside because I saw the concert with my older sister, my health teacher (who my sister was dating at the time), and my best buddy Mark. I wouldn’t attend my first concert at Blossom until a year later when I saw The Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, and John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band on a triple bill the next summer. And, for what it’s worth, I did see Pink Floyd on their Momentary Lapse of Reason tour in the fall of ’88, so I guess that’s something.

My other concert regret is a little different and much more recent, so the wound is still fresh. Jack has been taking private drum lessons for just over a year now, and he just started up with fifth grade band this school year. He loves percussion, and I’m always eager to share anything I think he’ll appreciate – like The Black Keys, The Who, and Rush.

So when I saw Rush was touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of Moving Pictures, I knew I was going to take Jack. I was able to get in on the presale and get us some amazing seats in the lower bowl, stage right, near the stage. I was ridiculously excited. Then, after purchasing the tickets, I realized that there was a good chance we were actually going to be in Hawaii the day of the show.

This was a trip Tracy was trying to earn through work, and you don’t turn down free airfare, five-star hotel accommodations, and all food and entertainment included. I get that, and I was not then, nor am I now, ungrateful for the opportunity to return to the islands and enjoy a fantastic family vacation. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there is a tiny little part of me that is still disappointed that Jack and I didn’t get to share that concert-going experience.

I have seen Rush numerous times throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but this was different. The band was playing Moving Pictures in its entirety, I was taking my kiddo with me, we had killer seats from the pre-sale, and the band was taping the show for release on DVD and Blu-Ray. I have never, to my knowledge, attended a show that has been officially released like that, and even though we weren’t at the show, you damn well better believe that Blu-Ray is on my Christmas list this year!

Living Large

2011-10-31T16:09:00.000-04:00

Tony Bennett
29 October 2011: State Theatre at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

So for the third time in ten days, I found myself at the State Theatre in Playhouse Square Sunday night. Playhouse Square is made up of five primary theatres: the Allen, Hanna, Ohio, Palace, and State. Combine those venues with all the other options in Northeast Ohio, like the Akron Civic, House of Blues, and EJ Thomas, and it’s pretty remarkable that I would end up at the same place for all three shows.

While not the quite the 3 Shows In 3 Nights endurance marathon Tracy and I embarked on in early 2010, the events I attended this month were certainly as varied. Duran Duran the previous Wednesday with Tracy kicked things off, continuing with the Kathy Griffin show Sunday night with my buddy Alan, and concluding with Tony Bennett Saturday night.

The night began, fittingly, in Little Italy at the Trattoria on the Hill, an institution in the neighborhood that Tracy and I have been to numerous times over the years, just not often enough because of proximity. Located east of downtown Cleveland near University Circle and Case Western Reserve University, Little Italy is a great place to stroll and dine and soak in atmosphere. Unfortunately, it’s not really close enough to be convenient enough to just pop over for an afternoon. It is a destination location for us when we have a show or special night out, and we had both Saturday night. The Tony Bennett tickets were a gift to my in-laws for my father-in-law’s birthday.

The in-laws had never been to the Trattoria, so it was fun to share this unique bit of Cleveland with them before heading down Euclid Avenue to Playhouse Square. Bennett’s show was scheduled to start at 8, and a few minutes after the hour the house announcer welcomed us to The Tony Bennett Show and asked us to first greet Antonia Bennett. I don’t think Antonia would be singing professionally if she weren’t opening for her dad. Her short set was disappointing in that it was unexpected and because she clearly did not inherit her Father’s vocal chops. Unremarkable is the nicest way to describe Antonia’s voice. Thankfully, she worked her way quickly through a half-dozen or so standards and brought her dad on stage without an intermission.

Bennett, the elder, has not missed a beat. He perfectly nailed every song through the nearly hour-and-a-half long set. His rendition of “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret was simply stellar, probably my favorite of the night. But matching his song selection was Bennett’s easy banter with the audience. Following his run through of “Cold, Cold Heart”, he told the story of songwriter Hank Williams calling to give him a hard time for “ruining” his song. And Bennett introduced an amazing rendition of Charlie Chaplin’s classic “Smile” by talking about the handwritten note he received from the songwriter thanking him when he recorded the cover.

There was a dedication to Lady Gaga, who performs with Bennett on his Duets II album, and at one point Bennett’s daughter returned to perform a duet with her dad. There were age-appropriate jokes about how the 85-year-old crooner and Rosemary Clooney were the first American idols, and pop music trivia history lessons delivered through tales of his being discovered by Pearl Bailey and how (Clevelander) Bob Hope came up with his professional name.

The crown jewel of the evening, however, was Bennett’s show closing “Fly Me to the Moon”, performed without a microphone while his band quietly backed him. I have extolled the virtues of Playhouse Square’s SmartSeats in the past. Most shows at all of the Playhouse Square venues tend to offer the $10 cheap seats tickets for the last row or two of the theatre, and Tracy and I take advantage of the offer anytime it’s available for a show we want to see. The Tony Bennett Show was no different. You get what you pay for, and we were appropriately seated in the very last row of the auditorium. However, as testament to both Bennett’s vocal ability and the amazing acoustics of the venue, we heard every word, every note, perfectly. The man can sing. Period.

Orienteering

2011-10-26T08:52:00.007-04:00

I recently reread Uncanny X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga. If you’ve read my book, Deus ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic Book Fan, then you know this was the trade paperback that jumpstarted my long-dormant love of comics. Reading this classic X-Men tale again was a real treat, and I find that each run through of the material yields something new to me. This time, what really struck me was the brilliance of writer Chris Claremont and penciller & co-plotter John Byrne’s work, specifically, the recap on page two of issue #134. It’s preceded by the expected splash page, but by itself the second page is impeccable. The simplicity of it belies the complexity of where we are in the story. It’s both a visual feast of color and a descriptive bit of storytelling to orient the reader. Perfect.

Mini Marvels Magic

2011-10-24T09:54:00.001-04:00

Jack loves Chris Giarrusso’s G-Man books and his Mini Marvels work (which I’m also a fan of)! So having the opportunity to meet the man in-person at Mid-Ohio Con was a pretty big deal. The kiddo took his copy of G-Man for Giarrusso to sign. Walking away Jack looked inside the book to find that not only did Giarrusso sign it, but he also did a little G-Man sketch in it, too! So the kiddo had to run back to the table to thank him again!

When I saw that Giarrusso was doing 8 ½ by 11 sketches for just $20 a pop, Jack and I talked about it and decided we couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I have had Hawkeye on the mind since wrapping up the piece I just wrote for the upcoming spring issue of Back Issue magazine, so I knew right away what I wanted. For Jack, who has always loved the three-legged Iron Spider-Man gag in “The Iron Avengers” Mini Marvels story, it was also a no-brainer. We couldn’t be happier with the results!

Mid-Ohio Con Quick Recap

2011-10-23T15:57:00.000-04:00

I have always heard great things about Mid-Ohio Con, but have never had the chance to attend. It’s now a Wizard World show, but that didn’t stop us from heading south for the day to commune with our comic and geek brethren!

Some highlights…

Being at the show with my wife, kiddo, and Alan!
Getting to spend time catching up with creator friends like Marc Sumerak and Dean Stahl. (Oh, and Alan picked up a copy of Marc's All-Ghouls School trade paperback, which I read last night. What a fun read that's definitely worth checking out!)
Meeting cool creators like Chris Giarrusso (kiddo got his copy of G-Man signed, and we commissioned a couple of great Mini Marvel sketches!), Beck Seashols (talked Star Wars and dachshunds with the fellow native Northeast Ohioan!), Brian Atkins (Robert’s little brother!), and Bill Sienkiewicz (signed my Elektra Omnibus!), among others.
Running into so many fellow POP! Comic Culture Club members throughout the day.
Filling some holes in my ROM run from the back issue bins.
Watching my wife turn to goo while meeting James Marsters (and getting to meet him myself – he was a really cool guy).

Like a Birthday or a Pretty View

2011-10-20T17:18:00.000-04:00

Duran Duran
19 October 2011: State Theatre at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

I have had Duran Duran’s new album in heavy rotation for months now. I love All You Need Is Now as much as any of their classic stuff. Completely against the cultural norm, I have been listening to the entire album as opposed to just the singles, whereas, back in the day I focused primarily on their hits. The result is All You Need Is Now has become one of my all-time favorite Duran Duran albums and one that I know every song from top-to-bottom.

Tracy and I have been excited about the show since we bought the tickets, so much so that I even convinced Jeff and Anna to pick up tickets when we got together for some home brewing a few weeks ago. Although we weren’t seated together, they were just in the next section over, so we got to hang out when we arrived, after Neon Trees’ opening set, and immediately following Duran Duran’s show. A good concert experience with good friends is hard to beat, and that’s just what we got as Adam & Jeff’s ’80s Alternative Rewind Adventure rolled on Wednesday night!

The celebrating throng was evenly distributed between men and women, and none of the guys in the audience looked like they were there under duress. The entire crowd was appreciative of the show, rising to their feet when the house lights first dimmed a few minutes after 9, and the only time they sat back down was during the brief mid-set “Tiger Tiger” instrumental off of Seven and the Ragged Tiger, giving lead singer Simon Le Bon’s voice a rest.

It’s hard to find any complaints at all with the song selection. I would call it perfect; Tracy would have liked to have heard “Girls On Film”. Seven of the twenty-song set were pulled from All You Need Is Now, and those cuts really shone. The title track and “Girl Panic!”, my two favorite tracks off of the new album, may not eclipse the classic stuff, but they certainly matched those songs with their hooks, delivery, and energy.

I was startled by how powerful and moving “Come Undone” was live. The other big surprise was just how damn fun “(Reach Up for the) Sunrise” was. Off of 2004’s Astronaut, it’s a song I’ve never paid much attention to, but it was a raucous main set closer!

My two favorite classic Duran Duran songs – “A View to a Kill” and “The Reflex” – were expected highlights that absolutely delivered, but, honestly, none of their definitive stuff fell short. “Is There Something I Should Know?”, “Careless Memories”, “Notorious”, “Hungry Like the Wolf” were all second half highlights. And the encore was above reproach: “Wild Boys” with a bit of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s classic “Relax” mixed in, and “Rio”.

My only complaint on the night: We were in the first row of the upper balcony, and the static stage backlights were seemingly aimed right at us. My eyes still hurt the next morning from staring straight into the blinding lights for two hours.

Although Tracy has seen Duran Duran before, 13-year-old her was still squealie and happy, and I had an amazing time. The combination of good friends, an excellent current album of material to work with, raw energy, an in-the-moment crowd, and a perfect song selection made for a great night!

Saving 12-Year-Old Me from the Avengers

2011-10-16T13:10:00.000-04:00

Twelve-year-old me is positively beside himself about the Avengers movie coming next spring. And, I have to admit, 41-year-old me is pretty excited about it, too. I have never done an opening night, midnight screening of a movie, but I told Tracy and Jack when we left the theater after seeing Captain America that I am all about it for the Avengers premiere!

The interwebs and Twitterverse were abuzz last week when the first official trailer for Avengers was released. I was so excited when I finally hit the “play” button on my iPad, but, if I’m honest with myself, I was ultimately pretty let down by it.

There were three things that played against it for me...

First, the bulk of the trailer’s action sequences consisted of the explosions filmed in Cleveland this summer. When director Joss Whedon and his crew descended on Northeast Ohio earlier this year the Avengers hype reached a pretty high mark. I was fortunate enough to hear all kinds of cool behind the scenes details about the big budget production from a fellow POP! club member who was an extra during filming, and I don’t think I know anyone who avoided long and short clips of the action filmed here playing on the local news and YouTube months ago.

Second, the use of Nine Inch Nails’ “We’re in this Together” off 1999’s The Fragile felt horribly out of place. It was similar to my reaction rewatching the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie recently: The soundtrack dated the movie horribly. My affection for Nine Inch Nails, though deep, apparently does, in fact, know bounds.

Finally, there’s the thing that really rubbed me completely the wrong way about the trailer: Samuel L. Jackson’s first line in the trailer as Nick Fury is the answer to Agent Coulson’s off screen question, “What do we do?” And instead of a “We kick some ass!” or “We defend Earth!” or any number of bad ass quips you could hope for, you get a completely neutered, “We get ready.”

Wait.

What? We just... get ready?!

Every time I hear that line, it’s delivered in my head in Eddie Murphy’s mocking-the-up-tight-black-cop “You’re not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe” voice from Beverly Hills Cop.

Now, I realize this is a “getting the band together” movie, and the overall theme of it probably is actually about, well, getting ready… the heroes we’ve seen in all the other great Marvel movies being gathered by S.H.I.E.L.D. and preparing for battle against this movie’s Big Bad. But, man, I really expected more badassery out of the gate when Nick Fury first opens his mouth.

I guess I need to avoid any more promotional hype for this juggernaut whenever I can, for my sake and the sake of 12-year-old me who really, really wants to love this movie.

Deus ex Comica November Author Visit

2011-10-07T08:55:00.000-04:00

Seems like forever since I last did an author visit, but when the North Canton Library reached out to me to do a reading from Deus ex Comica and talk about the writing process, my self-publishing experience, and comics in general, I couldn't pass it up.

What better way to celebrate a new comics Wednesday than by coming out to the North Canton Library, located at 185 North Main Street, on November 2, and supporting a local author and the local library system?

The program will start at 6pm with some prepared thoughts and selected readings from Deus ex Comica, followed by an open discussion. Hope to see you there!

I Play Along with the Charade

2011-09-06T08:57:00.003-04:00

Rick Springfield
04 September 2011: Akron Civic Theatre, Akron, Ohio

Let’s get this out of the way up front: I love Rick Springfield’s music. Love it. It’s of a time, but I’m ok with that. And, as I have said before, “Jessie’s Girl” might be the single greatest Power Pop song ever recorded.

Without having an older sister, I doubt I would have ever gotten into Rick Springfield. She was getting out of high school as I was just starting middle school, so the age difference was always a factor between us, but there are certain artists and songs that remind me of her. I remember her going to see Springfield in concert back in the day at least a couple of times (and thinking it was cool that Corey Hart was the opening act for one of those shows). When I told my sister that Tracy and I were going to the show, her reaction was first, “He’s still touring?” And second, “Does he have enough songs to fill an entire set?”

Maybe my expectations were too high, but, I mean, come on! It’s Rick fucking Springfield! All he has to do is come out, play his greatest hits collection, and everyone leaves satisfied. How do you screw that up?!

I guess the answer is by opening with a 2007 non-album track that only the die-hards will know. Hello, ironically named “Who Killed Rock N’ Roll”! You follow that up with a couple of decent tracks off 1983’s Living in Oz (“Affair of the Heart” and the title track), then play a cover song (I dig Paul McCartney, but if I want to hear “Jet” I’ll listen to a Wings album), and a track off his 2008 album called “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” (seriously).

But then came Mr. Springfield’s most egregious error of the night: the mid-set MegaMix™. Five songs into the show, he rips through the choruses of eight of his hits in a horrible, giant mashup. “I Get Excited”, “Bop ‘Til You Drop”, “Celebrate Youth”, “Calling All Girls”, “Jessie’s Girl” (just a one line teaser), “Don’t Walk Away”, “State of the Heart”, and “What Kind of Fool Am I?” were all represented. Tracy and I were dumbfounded, and rightfully worried we weren’t going to hear those songs again that night in anywhere close to their complete form.

Coming out of this bizarre A.D.D. warp, he played “I’ve Done Everything for You” (yea), “Venus in Overdrive” (which I’m pretty sure is about his sexual addiction – meh), “Rock of Life” and “Love Is Alright Tonight” (almost back on track), and some unknown Blues tune (which I’ve since realized was Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House” – but, another cover? really?!).

On paper, looking at how he wrapped up the main set might make you think he finished strong, but you’d be mistaken. I get that he has a shtick, and that he does it every show, but going into the crowd and passing the mic among very drunk women in their late 40s to badly sing “Don’t Talk to Strangers” is just a really bad idea.

“Love Somebody” was good, and “Human Touch” was... um, interesting as he waded into the first ten or so rows of the main floor seating area. “Jessie’s Girl” closed the main set, but by then we were almost too disillusioned by the previous 75 minutes of music to even enjoy it. And the distraction of the myriad drunken women hoisting themselves on stage and onto Springfield got old quick. (This coming from someone who’s seen Tom Jones in concert. Twice!)

The band returned for an encore. Unfortunately, we have no idea what the first song even was, and the second song was an album cut from Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet that neither Tracy nor I recognized until we looked it up.

Driving home from the show, Tracy and I continued to marvel over our disappointment. Tracy said the show wasn’t as bad as the one we saw Huey Lewis put on in Maui this Spring (a show we didn’t pay to see, or particularly want to see, but that I probably need to write about sometime), but it also wasn’t as good as the one the Limousines’ put on as an opening act back on Memorial Day weekend.

I told Tracy that there’s just no reason for him to put on a bad show, but he somehow managed to do it. And maybe that’s why his star didn’t continue to burn as brightly as it once did in the ’80s and why he’s not a superstar now.

And the MegaMix™ really honked me off more than it probably should, but, damn. Just play the songs, Rick.

Cosplay Vigilantism

2011-08-17T16:53:00.000-04:00

I finally had an opportunity to watch the documentary Superheroes on HBO this week. I also read my friend Will’s write-up on the movie, and I think he was far too easy on the filmmaker and his subjects. What these people are doing is dangerous. They are endangering themselves, the people around them in public when they attempt to fight crime, and potentially their families and loved ones.

Nearly all of the subjects had a history of having been physically abused, witnessed physical abuse, or a personal account of drug abuse and/or violence. I would have preferred the filmmaker explore the psychological issues that may have led these people to put on a costume and, oftentimes, hide behind a mask and attempt to fight crime. The impact this pursuit has had on the “heroes” real life – day jobs, relationships, family – would have been far more interesting than following them on “patrols.”

The obvious path these people should be taking is to follow a career in law enforcement, but given the histories of many of these “heroes,” that simply isn’t a viable option. But there are other opportunities to do good in one’s community instead of the bait-patrol tactics some of these folks use. The Jewish hero calling himself “Life” in NYC and the couple in Portland, Oregon – Zetaman and Apocalypse Meow, didn’t come off as superheroes so much as people reaching out to their respective homeless communities while wearing costumes.

While San Diego’s Mr. Xtreme seems to have his heart in the right place in his attempts to raise awareness of violent crimes and sex criminals, I think it was stunningly irresponsible of the Deputy Mayor to honor this “superhero” and provide a forum for him to promote his activities. Mr. Xtreme’s parents were compelling in their disapproval of their son’s hobby, and Apocalypse Meow was fascinating in that when her significant other revealed his Zetaman hero identity to her she protested, then not only enabled him, but has joined him.

By definition, vigilantes believe their government/police force is ineffective, and many of these “heroes” expressed that exact sentiment as motivation behind their pursuit. Superheroes could have been a fascinating psychological exploration and a cautionary tale, instead it comes off as a confused film that can’t decide if it wants to glorify a group of vigilantes or mock them.

POP! Life

2011-08-03T08:04:00.001-04:00

When I first got back into comics I frequented a few online forums. I made some good friends from all over the world and getting to see them is what makes going to cons so great these days. But there are the other folks on forums that make things unpleasant hiding behind their inflated egos, careless derision, and safe anonymity. Those people, along with a very busy family life and a job that involves travel, have moved any kind of online forum activity completely off my priorities list. But POP!: The Comic Culture Club is a different animal.

Back in February, in the middle of the day, I saw a tweet from Marc Sumerak about a local comic club meeting taking place that evening in Parma Heights. Literally, the day of the first meeting, I heard about it and decided to take a chance. I had met Marc on a couple of occasions (and even wrote about the first time we met in my book Deus ex Comica – page 113 for those of you playing along at home) and knew him to be a good guy, so I figured I’d give it a go.

I love the openness of the group – even at that first meeting, it was obvious that most everyone else in the room knew each other previously, but I never felt like an outsider. And even though there are clear “Marvel” and “DC” lines drawn among the group, there is no animosity or mean-spiritedness about the discussion. The conversations are often more about curiosity (“Tell me what DC did with this” or “Hey, how did Marvel handle a similar situation” kind of talk) than anything even remotely resembling trash talk. I think that’s a credit to how Marc and fellow club organizer Jae Fitch established the meetings from the get-go. That I could say I’d never read the Death of Superman or fellow club member Dave could say he’d never read Miller’s Daredevil run and no one goes into over-the-top histrionics is a testament to the sincerity of the group.

I have no problem making time once every couple of weeks to drive 40 minutes each way to meet up with some likeminded people to talk about a culture we love for a couple of hours. POP! is like having the best of all worlds – the comic-centric discussions of forums without the snark and the great face-to-face interaction of hanging out at a comic shop or con.

Having said all that, life does sometimes get in the way of comics. I did pretty good making the first few months’ worth of meetings, but work travel and family obligations do still take priority when scheduling conflicts arise. While these are all very good reasons to miss POP! meetings, it doesn’t mean I don’t miss being a part of this great community when I have to skip a gathering.

Most meetings begin with an open forum on current events – a newly released comic-based movie or trailer, whatever comic-related news is the current hot topic, or maybe a follow-up thought from the previous meeting, or anything else on your mind. From there, the conversation moves to the chosen main topic of the night. Themes are just specific enough to generate conversation, but generally broad enough to never feel too confining. Past topics include Death in Comics, Cosmic Comics, Genre Comics, and Comic Worlds. Upcoming meetings will focus on Legendary Battles, Superheroes without Super Powers, Anti-Heroes, and more.

I want this club to see continued success, which is why I do what I can to promote the group on the web and in conversations and try to recruit new members wherever possible. As a direct result of the meetings, I’ve gotten to know Marc better. It’s also been great to reconnect with my other buddy Mark (who I hadn’t seen in over 20 years prior to getting him to show up to a POP! Club meeting!) and meeting Chuck from Star Joes podcast (who I’d never met in person, but had been corresponding with and trying to coordinate meeting for over a year). And there are people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet exclusively through the club, like Jason and the aforementioned Dave, who I have tremendous respect for and see as the DC yin to my Marvel yang.

Over the months I’ve watched our club grow from a handful of us at that first meeting to upwards of two-dozen attendees each meeting. Gatherings officially run from 7 to 8:30 on designated Wednesday evenings, but conversations invariably linger until the library closes at 9. It was obvious from almost the very beginning an “after-meeting” venue was necessary to keep the conversation going into the night, and the post-meeting gatherings around town are a good thing.

But with all this interpersonal contact, that’s all not to imply there isn’t an online presence for the club. There is an official Twitter feed and, although I’m not on Facebook, there is a Facebook group. I’m hopeful we can get a lot of the members on Google+ soon, too, because I think the circles and huddles concepts lend themselves beautifully to what this club is all about and would be another way to be an active part of the club between meetings. There has been talk of recording meetings for a podcast, but I think by virtue of our size that probably just isn’t a realistic option any more (a happy problem to have outgrown the idea already).

I recognize that among comic cities, New York, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, seem to be the hotspots, but with POP! I like to think we’re carving out our own respectable, organized community of comic book fans and professionals here in Northeast Ohio. Everyone’s welcome!

POP! Summer 2011 Schedule

August 03: “Fight of the Century: Legendary Battles”
* Parma South Library (7335 Ridge Rd., Parma)

August 17: “Rise of the Everyman: Superheroes Without Superpowers”
* ParmaTown Denny’s (8111 Day Dr., Parma)

August 31: “I Walk The Line: Vigilantes and Anti-Heroes”

September 14: “Toys! Adventure in the Palm of Your Hand”

September TBA: “POP!Corn Movie Night”

October 19: “How to Make Comics (The Sumerak Way!)”

POP!: The Comic Culture Club meetings take place from 7-8:30pm at the Parma Heights Public Library (6206 Pearl Rd, Parma Heights) unless otherwise noted. All meeting dates are Wednesdays (new comic day!).

Revolution

2011-08-01T08:43:00.006-04:00

I didn’t actually see MTV when it debuted on August 1, 1981. Oh, I’d heard about it. I had friends in the next town over who had it, and I’d seen the “I want my MTV” ads (but that must have been while at my friends’ houses because I have to think that was a basic cable ad).

When I finally saw MTV, it was at my buddy Dave’s. I can picture his parents’ house and just where the television was positioned and the feeling of hanging out there. And I remember the very first video I saw at his house: Saga’s “On the Loose”. It was pretty typical fare for early MTV, a basic performance shoot interspersed with a literal (and somewhat pedestrian) prison break storyline. But that was my first, and it did exactly what the corporate music industry wanted it to: It prompted me to buy Saga’s Worlds Apart album on cassette tape (my first – I’d bought 8-tracks up to that point).

There are all kinds of retrospectives about MTV turning 30, and I remember how revolutionary the station really was in the early ’80s once we actually got basic cable in our house and could watch the artists come to life in short-form anytime I wanted. And I remember the release of the “Thriller” video being an event, and watching the channel’s coverage of Live Aid, and witnessing the beginning of the end for MTV as a music video channel with the debut of Remote Control and the final nail in that coffin a few years later with the premiere of Real World. But it’s the personal details that frame the larger cultural touchstones and bestow importance upon them, and a previously unheard of and long since forgotten Saga is among those particulars for me.

Who We Used To Be

2011-07-22T09:34:00.000-04:00

Nine Inch Nails
27 June 2006: Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is a folk hero in these parts. A musician friend of mine once observed, “Everybody in Northeast Ohio has a Trent story.” And she’s right. My wife has hers (tales of Trent dating her best friend and of watching Trent play in his garage), I have mine (memories of Trent frequenting the record shop I worked at, bringing in and playing demos of what would become Pretty Hate Machine) and our friends have theirs. Even now, over 20 years after he arrived in Cleveland, Reznor’s impact on the local music landscape is as legendary as the way he changed the face of industrial music on a global scale. Given all that history, when he plays here, the shows seem to be about more than just the music.

I have seen Nine Inch Nails in concert more times than I can count, and all of them at assorted hole-in-the-wall Cleveland bars and venues in support of Pretty Hate Machine in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The debut album was a perfect storm: The fury and passion behind the lyrics mixed with a completely different sound that bled into my world; I found it at a time when I was also discovering new sides of myself. The album came along at just the right time to be the single most influential collection of songs in my life before or since. For that reason, I originally approached Reznor’s homecoming show with reservation. But at the urging of my wife, and the opportunity to see Goth godfathers Bauhaus, I was persuaded.

And when Bauhaus strolled on stage amid fog machines and white light for their hour-long set, I knew I had made the right decision. It was strange to see the founders of the Goth movement playing while the sun was still up. The rains and humidity had created real fog just off to the left of the amphitheater stage, carrying the theatrics into the crowd of Goth girls in black prom dresses and punks who weren’t around when Bauhaus originally formed. We were close enough to the stage to see the band well, but far enough away to preserve my original images of the group in their heyday.

Songs like “Double Dare”, “In the Flat Field”, “Rosegarden Funeral of Sores”, and the one-two closers “Stigmata Martyr” and “Dark Entries” all sounded as fresh as they do on 1982’s live effort, Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape. Thoughts of an album of new material danced through the heads of the faithful as the new tunes, “Adrenaline” and “Endless Summer of the Damned”, were unveiled -- although the latter was slight on substance and long on cliché (as evidenced by the title), even for these guys.

The sibling rhythm section of Kevin Haskins and David J carried the show, and you could feel the muscular beats pulsing in your chest. Peter Murphy’s singing was spot on, and he sounded every bit the English gentleman, even as he bitched out the lighting people from the stage – pointing out the differences between left and right and telling them not to fuck it up again. Daniel Ash, sporting a white shag carpet vest and oversized bug-eye sunglasses, was the consummate glam rock guitarist. And his on-stage shtick was the same as it was 25 years ago – stalking the stage, playing guitar on his knees, and punctuating songs with his saxophone skronk.

During Bauhaus’ set, the rains stopped and the temperature dropped. Blossom’s lawn took on mudslide qualities and visions of Reznor’s infamous Woodstock appearance were replaying in my mind. Although the mosh pit in front of the stage was complemented nicely by a mud pit at the base of the sloping lawn, a recreation of the literal mud-slinging of that ’94 incident never materialized here. Shortly after sunset, the house lights dimmed, and the deafening roar of the crowd was supplanted by the slow build of “Somewhat Damaged” – the first of five songs off of 1999’s The Fragile. (The song selection was the most curious aspect of the show. Apart from the new song, “Non Entity”, the band only played three songs off of the support album, With Teeth, and three off of the critical and popular darling, The Downward Spiral. Four songs each were played off of Pretty Hate Machine and the stop-gap Broken EP.)

Hearing songs that I had never previously experienced live was a treat. The folding cage of lights that was lowered and raised throughout the show was partially down during “Closer” – where the center section slowly “filled” with red Matrix-style dashes and blips of light, but it was the funky workout of Broken’s “Suck” towards the end of the set that really stood out. The touring band, which includes Jordie White (formerly Twiggy Ramirez of Marilyn Manson’s band) and Josh Freese (who has played with Akron’s Devo), allowed the song to retain its aggressive nature while stretching and breathing in a groove.

While “Hurt” was an expected showstopper, it exceeded expectations. Reznor was exposed, alone on keyboards, and it was as intimate as any of the 100-listener shows I saw him perform over two decades ago. Something about the ringing piano and Reznor’s melodies never seem quite right, they always seem broken – musically, emotionally. Although the song isn’t a sing-along, per se, the crowd made it one in the most reverential of ways and as the band came in at the end for a beautiful slow burn, there was nothing left but passion.

Of the new songs, “Only” could be the next “Down In It”. From its emphasis on synthesizers to Reznor’s more-rapping-than-singing approach to the “tiniest little dot” lyrical reference, the song is a throwback to the Pretty Hate Machine material.

Things got arena-rock clichéd, though, during the chorus, when too-clever lighting took the focus off the band and put it on the crowd during “There is no you” and reversed the effect during the “There is only me” lines. The clap-along to “The Hand that Feeds” also treaded the cliché, but that is today’s Nine Inch Nails – including a Reznor who has transformed himself from skinny kid into Henry Rollins’ little brother, complete with ’roid-y muscles, sleeveless shirts, and a buzz cut.

Although I understand what Reznor has done with his music (and image, for that matter), I have had a love/hate relationship with him since the early days, when he wrote the soundtrack for my life and then turned around and marketed it to frat boys. And “The Hand that Feeds” almost seems like an acknowledgement, an apology for it – “What if the whole crusade’s a charade / And behind it all there’s a price to be paid... Just how deep do you believe? / Will you bite the hand that feeds?... Are you brave enough to see it? / Do you want to change it?” – wrapped in a neat industrial-pop package, of course.

This night, it was the Pretty Hate Machine cuts that were the most amazing. I had forgotten how powerful these songs are when played live. The synths of “Something I Can Never Have” were mixed behind the chest-rumbling bass and stripped-bare vocals, complete with a cough by Reznor that made it all the more real. Synths poked through the guitars’ wall of sound like glass stabbing at skin on “Down In It”, and the party spun out of control during the set closing “Head Like a Hole”. Ferocious, angry, exhilarating. Hands and voices were raised as one: “Bow down before the one you serve!” The crowd noise was deafening as the house lights came up, the cage lowered, and the “NIN” logo was flashed in lights on it. No need for an encore.

Regardless of the mixed up nostalgia and confusion that accompanies growing older and watching your heroes do the same, everything about this show felt right. And between songs, Reznor summed it all up perfectly when he told the crowd, “It’s good to be home. All grown up.”

(Edited versions of this piece have been published by PopMatters and Field’s Edge.)

Setting Sail

2011-07-19T07:42:00.001-04:00

Disney Live in Concert – Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, with the Blossom Festival Orchestra and Chorus (Conducted by Richard Kaufman)
16 July 2011: Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

Summer in Ohio. If you can stand the humidity, it can be pretty amazing. Bike rides, hiking, lightening bugs, farmers markets, and outdoor concerts. Nestled in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Blossom Music Center has been around since 1968 and the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra for all those years. Although I was originally exposed to Blossom through contemporary music acts, in the years since returning to Northeast Ohio, we have enjoyed the orchestra in their summer home on numerous occasions, like seeing and hearing them score Looney Tunes on the big screens and attending Star Wars in Concert. And this past Saturday night, the orchestra provided the full underscore to a screening of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Say what you will about the sequels (because, boy, are they hard to watch), the original Pirates of the Caribbean movie is clever and funny and intense and full of action! We were very excited to have a family night out to experience one of our favorite movies at one of our favorite venues in such a unique way.

When you attend a rock concert at Blossom, you aren't allowed to bring anything into the amphitheater and are searched and bags are inspected and the whole nine. When you attend a Cleveland Orchestra Blossom Festival event you are encouraged to bring your own food and drink (yes, alcohol, too), come early to picnic, and are never searched and no bags are ever checked. Oh, and kids under 18 are FREE. So, we had a light early dinner, and packed up some cheese and crackers, grapes and plums, some bottled water, a couple bottles of Longboard, mixed drinks, some folding chairs, blankets, and a Frisbee, and headed out to Blossom around 7 for the 9pm show.

Divided between pavilion and lawn, Tracy and I generally prefer pavilion for rock concerts and lawn for orchestra shows. It's nice to spread out with your blankets and lawn chairs and coolers and enjoy a night under the stars. The lawn was moderately full at 7:30, and was jam-packed by 9, but we had a sweet spot where we could see one of the jumbo screens and the orchestra doing its thing on stage. The kiddo and I killed time between our arrival and show starting by heading over to the north lawn to toss the Frisbee around among the other attendees with their footballs and baseballs and volleyballs and such.

By the time we made our way back to Tracy and our spot on the lawn, the late-day humidity was pretty thick (especially after chasing a Frisbee around for half an hour!), but nothing a beer for me and bottle of water for the kiddo couldn't cure.

Just as Mother Nature provided her own dramatic “dimming of the house lights,” we broke out our glow sticks, and the show began right on time. The mosquitoes never bothered us, although there was a nip in the air after the sun went down. It was a damp chill that must’ve had as much to do with the humidity as the temperature, but we had blankets and each other to help stay comfortable.

The orchestra was amazing, as always. Tracy and I ended up commenting throughout the entire weekend how amazing it is to realize the music was being played right there in front of us while we watched one of our favorite movies! With the intermission, the movie didn’t wrap up until nearly midnight, but the late night was absolutely worth any exhaustion we felt Sunday. The score for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie is so iconic and recognizable; it was a natural fit for an exercise like this, and a perfect way to spend a summer Saturday night in Northeast Ohio.

Generic Blog Post

2011-06-28T08:11:00.004-04:00

I love hanging out with John. And a few Saturday’s ago, we had some time free of family responsibilities and decided to meet up at the Hartville Flea Market. It’s in the town where we grew up and, although it lacks the charm it held when we were younger, it can still yield the random, unexpected treasure.

Working our way through the stalls, we found a vendor selling comics. As I flipped through row after row of bagged and boarded single issues, I stumbled on Marvel’s Generic Comic Book. When I pulled it out of the longbox and held up the stark black and white cover, John glanced over at it and then me and asked if I’d ever seen that comic before. I answered, “no,” gobsmacking him right alongside me. It’s cover dated 1984 – clearly right in my wheelhouse, but remained under my radar for nearly 30 years!

I’m not naive enough to believe I know every Marvel comic of the era, but their quirky one-offs and stunt publishing endeavors always seemed to hold particular sway over me. Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-Men. Marvel Tails, Starring Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. Marvel Team-Up #74 between Spider-Man and the Not Ready For Prime Time Players. The adaptation of the TV show Sledge Hammer. The entire Assistant Editors’ Month run. (A collection of comics I adore so much, I devote an entire chapter of my book, Deus ex Comica, to the event!) But Generic Comic Book was an unknown quantity.

The price was right, so I decided to give it a go. I pulled it out of the taped-shut bag when I got home, and found no writing or art credits in it, only a “Stan Lee presents” banner across the splash page. I’m ok with that, actually. I mean, it’s generic, so nameless seems appropriate. It took some digging online, but the ever-reliable Comic Book Database tells me that Steve Skeates wrote the book and Larry Hama edited it. No idea who drew it, though.

According to the interwebs, Skeates worked for the legendary Warren Publishing in the 1970s (Creepy, Eerie, etc.), then wrote Generic Comic Book after being out of the industry for a brief time. One story claims Hama asked Skeates to write the book and that led to him getting the writing gig for the Peter Porker ongoing of 1984 that spun out of that Marvel Tails mentioned earlier.

As I was sitting down to read the book, a few thoughts swirled through my head... I wondered if the contents would be geared towards my 13 year-old self, or if it would be a more sophisticated satire that my present, adult self would better appreciate. Turns out, neither version of me found it all that remarkable. Even though I didn’t feel the book succeeded (the story wasn’t particularly entertaining and the art was dodgy throughout), maybe it actually did. I mean, maybe it’s entirely appropriate for a generic comic book to be somewhat bland and to play broad.

Reclaiming the Past

2011-06-23T08:51:00.000-04:00

At various points throughout Super 8 I asked myself, "Is this movie better than E.T.?"

Where E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial was my childhood world in real-time, Super 8 was still just a recreation of my youth through the clever use of childhood artifacts. That's not to say Super 8 is derivative. An homage? Yes. A love letter to the imprint Spielberg left on our collective childhood? Absolutely. But it stands on its own, rarely trying to be too clever; trading on its 1979 authenticity for a cheap nod-and-wink only once with some brief, non-essential (and unfortunately anachronistic) dialog about the Walkman.

With Super 8, writer-director J.J. Abrams has reclaimed the ’70s. Not as the camp joke it has become in our shared memory through disco, bell-bottoms, and That ’70s Show, but as it really felt when we were living it, unassumingly woven into the fabric of everyday lives.

From start to finish, Super 8 enveloped me. I knew the smell of Joe’s bedroom and the feel of Charles’ family’s kitchen. The familiarity of small town Ohio and the freedom of spending summer on your bike were as tangible here as they were my everyday reality 30 years ago. Abrams somehow captured the wonder of a late ’70s Midwestern childhood, fused it with Spielbergian tropes (like a single-parent household and extra-terrestrial elements), and came up with something so authentic, so genuine, it transcends the sentimental.

So, is Super 8 better than E.T.? I can only seem to answer the question this way: E.T. was the perfect movie for 11 year-old me, just as Super 8 – cut from the same cloth in terms of story, tone, and execution – is the perfect version of E.T. for 40 year-old me.

When the credits began to roll at the end of Super 8, Tracy turned to me and said, "That was awesome." Plastered to my theater seat with a nostalgic lump in my throat, I knew what she meant.

Who's Crazy?

2011-06-21T09:02:00.001-04:00

Next to Normal
16 June 2011: Palace Theatre at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

We were fortunate enough to have my oldest son, Mikee, up to visit with us last week. He is a huge fan of the theatre and all that goes with that world. And his favorite musical not so coincidentally was playing at the Palace Theatre the same week – Next to Normal.

Tracy and I had never seen the production and didn't know what to expect beyond it being a musical dealing with the very serious issue if mental illness. I think it's safe to say we were both blown away.

The show traces the emotional journey of a family trying to deal with a wife and mother who suffers from bipolar disorder (Diana, played by Kent State University grad Alice Ripley). Of the characters, my favorites were the husband/father (Dan) and the daughter (Natalie). The husband because I could relate to him – not because my wife or our family has been touched by this sickness, but because the struggle he endured trying to be that rock and maintain some kind of normal family structure is something with which I could identify.

The daughter was a heartbreaking character, treading delicately between scared girl and complete bitch. This balance was never more exposed than when you realized just how scared Natalie is – selfishly and honestly – at the realization that she could turn out just like her mom.

Among the various “Broadway Buzz” events Playhouse Square offers is Thursday night post-show chats with the cast. Immediately following the performance, we made our way down to the main floor for the dialog with the Emma Hunton (“Natalie”), Caitlin Kinnunen (understudy for “Natalie”), Pearl Sun (standby for “Diana”), Preston Sadleir (“Henry”), Bryan Perri (Musical Director), and Rachel Zack (Stage Manager). It was an interesting half-hour Q&A that theatre major Mikee ate up.

Next to Normal is not "feel good" theatre, having more in common with Spring Awakening and Rent than Mamma Mia! or Chicago. Not every Broadway musical is or needs to be a Mel Brooks or Disney adaptation. There is a place for this kind of serious and deeply sensitive art, and when done right it can hit every emotionally raw nerve while still being entertaining and satisfying.

Perfect

2011-06-18T11:43:00.005-04:00

Midday yesterday I tweeted that it was "Pretty much a perfect day so far."

Tracy and I took the day off work to hang out with the kiddo and my oldest son, Mikee, who's been visiting this week.

We went out for a late breakfast at First Watch, and while there Tracy and I ordered tickets to take my father-in-law to go see Tony Bennett this Fall.

Then it was off to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where we spent a few hours of the gorgeous day marveling at the Blue Heron rookery and hiking the Ledges, the Octagon, and Brandywine Falls. Refreshingly cool under the canopy of trees and among rock formations that were moved into place by glaciers hundreds of thousands of years ago, we couldn’t have asked for better weather.

Country Maid Ice Cream was all that we needed for lunch – kid’s-sized chocolate peanut butter scoop in a cake cone, thankyouverymuch!

We made a couple of stops on the way back to the house, and I snuck in a quick nap while everyone was getting cleaned up for dinner and the evening.

Then it was fabulous sushi at House of Hunan on the square in Medina that was accidentally but perfectly timed with getting to the theater in time for the 6:40 screening of Super 8.

After the movie, the boys discovered the Star Wars marathon on Spike, while Tracy wrapped some Father's Day gifts, and I began capturing my thoughts on seeing Next to Normal the night before and Super 8 that night.

Yesterday felt like a whole weekend in one day, but never rushed or over-planned. We rolled with each other and the weather and were rewarded with a perfect day. They can't all be, but yesterday was.

Vintage Central Florida, Part 7

2011-06-17T09:56:00.002-04:00

The last photo I recently uncovered from the series is the Olde Dixie Fried Chicken restaurant sign. From what I can tell, the restaurant is still around. And from street level, it appears the sign has been fully restored.

5925 South Orlando Avenue, Orlando, Florida

Vintage Central Florida, Part 6

2011-06-15T07:24:00.000-04:00

It’s easy to see from a quick Google Maps search that the building that once housed Arnold Paint & Wallpaper still exists, but the sign is gone, the façade’s been painted, and the space looks empty. That’s too bad.

538 North Bumby Avenue, Orlando, Florida

Vintage Central Florida, Part 5

2011-06-13T07:37:00.000-04:00

In our basement cleaning, I uncovered more of the vintage Orlando sign pictures I snapped back in 1998. The ones I originally blogged about two years ago (found here, here, here, and here) were the ones I had framed and on display at various times in our homes over the years. These few that I recently found are the cast-offs that didn’t click for me, but I figured they deserve an audience here.

First up is the Mills & Nebraska Lumber sign. Originally located at the corner of (you guessed it) Mills Avenue and Nebraska Street, from what I can tell on Google Maps, it looks like the whole place has been razed, but here’s a picture of the sign from 13 years ago.

1602 North Mills Avenue, Orlando, Florida

"Flaskaboozendancingshoes"

2011-06-02T20:37:00.000-04:00

I’ve had the Limousines’ Get Sharp in heavy rotation since picking it up at the show a week ago. I’m digging on the whole album, but one track in particular, “Flaskaboozendancingshoes”, is unstoppable.

I find myself listening to that track more than the others. It’ll finish, and I’ll touch replay before I even realize what I’m doing. So I finally had to sit up and pay attention to the song, listen actively and try to figure out its appeal for me. And I think I finally got to the bottom of it. I don’t know if anyone else would ever join the dots in the same way I did, but the reason I love this song is because there are echoes of the Cure’s “A Few Hour After This...”

In the simplest terms, like that Cure b-side that I hold in the highest regard, “Flaskaboozendancingshoes” is all at once musically sweeping and lyrically playful. Multi-instrumentalist Giovanni Giusti employs lush horns and chiming keyboards giving the song an aural fullness. It’s as if every nook and cranny of the song’s three minutes and 18 seconds is overflowing with a rich beauty that wraps itself around your brain.

Songwriter Eric Victorino’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics counter the music perfectly. The singer allows his imagination to run away from him as he projects where a club hookup might lead years down the road, from moving to the suburbs and giving their future kids “hippie names,” to “shitty sex in separate beds” and restraining orders.

There’s an innocence to the way the story builds and subtly spirals, until our hero realizes what’s happening and overcorrects, eventually finding the perfect balance between the potential of the relationship and the need to be in the moment. Ultimately deciding “I’ll just be me and you be you, two perfect strangers being sneaky with a flask of booze,” he tells her “I’ve got a stack of records, you just bring your dancing shoes.”

“Flaskaboozendancingshoes” is a near-perfect quirky pop song, resonating with my ‘80s nostalgia while bopping along with decidedly new millennial sensibilities.

Forest for the Trees

2011-05-31T06:49:00.004-04:00

Neon Trees
27 May 2011: House of Blues, Cleveland, Ohio

Tracy emailed me while I was on the road last week about the Neon Trees show at the House of Blues. She usually goes to her "new alternative" shows with her friend Betsy, but Betsy was unavailable and the tickets were only $8, so I offered to go with her. I figured after being out of town for a few days I couldn't beat that price for an evening out with my wife and the chance to hear some new music.

The last few shows we've been to at the House of Blues have been general admission, including the balcony seating. I don't know if that is their policy across the board now, but it's great. We arrived after eight, and the first opening act, Eastern Conference Champions, were already playing. The trio finished out their short set with all three of them drumming like mad when vocalist/keyboardist Josh Ostrander and bassist Melissa Dougherty joined Greg Lyons on his kit for an all-drum finale.

After a short break, the second of the three bands I'd never previously heard took the stage – The Limousines. Just by virtue of being two guys and a synthesizer, they immediately endeared themselves to me. Although they live somewhere between '80s synthpop giants like Erasure and Pet Shop Boys, and new millennia electronica superstars Daft Punk, they are worthy of that mantle by merging it all and spitting it back out as indietronica.

Live, there is a healthy dose of '90s Prodigy energy in the mix as well. While songwriter and vocalist Eric Victorino treads expected but not unwelcome frontman territory, it’s great to see multi-instrumentalist Giovanni Giusti break the stoic Vince Clark/Chris Lowe mold and rock out on stage among his computers and keyboards and iPads and drums! The duo push pop music to its logical next step with catchy-as-hell, incisive tracks like the “Internet Killed the Video Star” and “Very Busy People” singles. Hip-swayingly ironic without being fake, “Internet” announces “The kids are disco dancing; they’re tired of rock and roll. Don’t bother telling them that drum machine ain’t got no soul.” “Very Busy People” is a blissfully self-aware Millennium Generation anthem about ending up “numb from playing video games,” empty pizza boxes, and Donnie Darko. Other highlights of the set were “Dancing at Her Funeral”, “Flaskaboozendancingshoes” (perhaps my favorite of the night), and “Wildfires,” all off their 2010 debut Get Sharp.

Discovering the Limousines made the entire night worthwhile, and inevitably meant I was going to be let down by Neon Trees no matter what they did to try and win me over. While I appreciate Neon Trees’ message and understand why my wife digs them, they just weren’t my cuppa. But it was easy to sit back and enjoy the clearly devoted fanbase’s enthusiasm, including my wife’s need to dance.

One of the nice things about shows at the House of Blues is that more often than not the bands will be out in the lobby after their sets and after the show to meet fans and hang out. It was great to meet Eric and Giovanni from the Limousines and talk with them a little bit about their influences and thank them for a great show. Neon Trees were also out after the show, and Tracy wanted to meet them, so we waited in line for the opportunity to have them sign her ticket. There was a moment while Tracy was meeting the band that really struck me – it seemed to embody the coolness of the Neon Trees’ lead singer, Tyler Glenn. I was just hanging back behind Tracy while she was meeting the band. Not being a fan of the music or having any idea who the members of the band were, I simply didn’t have anything to say to them. But Tyler noticed me and, probably assuming I was a star-struck fan who didn’t know how to break the ice, reached out his hand to shake mine, thanked me for coming and hoped I’d had a good time. Although a bit of mistaken identity, I thought that was a really cool thing for him to do. And if I actually was that tongue-tied fan he assumed I was, his simple gesture would have made my night. Instead, he earned my respect.

On the whole, it was $16 well-spent… I discovered three new bands, one of which really got me excited. I got to chat with the various bands, hang out with my wife, and revel in her enjoyment. I call that a good night.

Memorial Day: Twenty Years Ago

2011-05-30T14:08:00.002-04:00

Twenty years ago, I worked for the Mouse. It was my first Disney job, and my first full-time employment living on my own and supporting myself. There was also a strange sense of surrealism to be surrounded by this make-believe world because the Gulf War was underway at the time.

I remember standing behind the desk at Guest Services of the Caribbean Beach Resort the night of January 17, and thinking how odd it was that I was explaining to newly arrived guests their dining options and booking reservations for them, and they had no idea yet that we had begun bombing Kuwait and were at war.

In resorts, back in the day there were always little things Disney would do as perks for the guests on various holidays. These things weren't worth anything to anyone other than a Disney collector, but they could be kind of cool in their own way.

If you were a Disney resort guest on Memorial Day in 1991, you got this: a 12-inch by 12-inch square poster close-up of Mickey saluting, and surrounding the image is the third stanza to America the Beautiful on heavy stock paper.

Of all the things like this I accumulated over the years I worked there, for some reason this one stuck with me and I hung on to it – even going so far as to have it professionally framed. I uncovered it recently while cleaning up the basement. Inexplicably, I again couldn't part with it, and it still resides in the "keep" pile.

Last Tour to Endor: The Original Star Tours Experience, Part 5

2011-05-20T08:13:00.000-04:00

Finally, there was de-boarding with travel posters, themed signage, and, of course, the merchandise location.

I’ll miss the original Star Tours, but the official opening of Star Tours: The Adventures Continue is today. While I won't be there any time soon, I am excited to ride as many of the 54 possible experiences the new attraction offers as possible on my next visit!

Last Tour to Endor: The Original Star Tours Experience, Part 4

2011-05-19T06:38:00.000-04:00

Inside the cabin of the Starspeeder 3000, there were more video reminders to stow loose items and prohibiting flash photography and smoking. Then there was Rex, the Paul Ruebens-voiced droid pilot of your journey. I snapped some blurry, in-motion, low-light level shots during the ride, including the last shot of the George Lucas look-alike who ducks under the control panel. The ride was a classic.

Last Tour to Endor: The Original Star Tours Experience, Part 3

2011-05-18T08:24:00.000-04:00

Here are some shots of the original Star Tours pre-show video. It’s all about themeing and that means immersion into the attraction’s world. Although certainly showing its age, Star Tours did that, in part, by creating a pre-boarding video incorporating everything from Ewoks and Chewbacca to the pre-show announcer’s funky hairstyles. Enjoy!

Last Tour to Endor: The Original Star Tours Experience, Part 2

2011-05-17T08:39:00.000-04:00

Today we have some shots of the queueing area at Star Tours in Orlando. It was pretty well-known for all the easter eggs and hidden Mickeys. Things like the letters and numbers on the conveyer baskets representing the initials and birthdates of the Imagineers who worked on the attraction, and the arrangement of droid parts to create the iconic three-circle Mickey Mouse head. I always loved the atmosphere they were able to convey with the use of light and animatronics...

Last Tour to Endor: The Original Star Tours Experience, Part 1

2011-05-16T08:11:00.000-04:00

I’m excited to experience the new Star Tours attraction at Walt Disney World. I’ve been following StarTours2Live.com and their Twitter feed for a while now, and with the official reopening of Star Tours: The Adventures Continue scheduled for the end of this week, I thought it might be fun to share some of our pictures from the Last Tour to Endor at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (though it'll always be "MGM" to me). The event was a part of Star Wars Celebration V that took place in Orlando, Florida, last August. Along with some key attractions like The Great Movie Ride and Toy Story Midway Mania, there was a special Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular that was reworked and retitled “Raiders of the Lost Jedi Temple of Doom: A Fan Film of ‘Epic’ Proportions” with all kinds of guest stars depending on which of the three performances you attended, and, of course, Star Tours was up and running.

I figured we’d start off with a couple of shots of the promotional diorama at the Disney booth at CV, and some event signage at the Studios…

Coat of Arms

2011-05-11T09:05:00.005-04:00

We are in the process of cleaning and purging the contents of our basement. We’ve held on to a lot of crap alongside a lot of important items from our collective and individual histories. Over the last few days and nights, I’ve been working my way through boxes of exclusively my stuff. Folders, photo albums, cartons of action figures and toys, baseball and football cards, cards from my wife, letters from friends… the same sorts of things you probably have in your basement.

I had a particular photo album that had all my organized sports team photos and all my class photos from grade school, along with all my choir and school programs, and miscellaneous items (like an autographed picture of Lindsay Wagner and a clipped story from the newspaper about Michael Jackson’s record setting eight Grammy awards win). But in the front of that album, on the very first page, was this…

I wish I could remember what year I made this. I am sure it was a school assignment – a “Make Your Own Crest” type of project. And I can still remember the reasons behind each and every item:

Purple and orange because they were my favorite colors (purple still is one of my favorites).
The basketball because, despite my size, I always loved to play it (just like my kiddo who faces the same size challenges).
My name in calligraphy because I was into art and my mom signed me up for a calligraphy class at the local art shop.
The tent because my family camped while growing up, and it was a huge part of my childhood (although we camped in a hardtop camper, not a tent, I took some artistic license here).
The Walkman, baby. Music has always been important to me.
Pitfall! I loved my Atari 2600, and I loved Pitfall.
A comic book. Note: Even as a kid I was apparently sensitive to copyright infringement issues and, instead of rendering my favorite Marvel comic cover, I opted to go generic. Or, at least, that’s the story we’ll go with to cover the fact that I probably spent my entire artistic bankroll interpreting the Pitfall screen capture.

So, yeah. It was crazy to stumble on this and realize just how accurate a representation of the kid version of me it is (clearly, I took this assignment seriously and put a lot of thought into it), and although I don’t go camping and I don’t play a lot of video games anymore, I do still enjoy shooting hoops with the kiddo, appreciate art, love music, and continue to read comics. I guess four out of six ain’t bad.

Agent Provocateur

2011-05-03T07:09:00.000-04:00

The Monster Ball Tour Starring Lady Gaga
27 April 2011: Quicken Loans Area, Cleveland, Ohio

If you know me, you know I have a soft spot for pop music. Girl pop, in particular, since the late ’90s. There was something about the Spice Girls and the pop confection they were putting out that I can trace this girl pop love directly back to those five ladies. From there it was Kylie and Britney and Rihanna and on and on, straight up through Adele. I love it.

Falling somewhere between my beloved girl pop and the serious artistry of Madonna is Lady Gaga. I disregarded Gaga as long as I could, but “Bad Romance” couldn’t be ignored. More than an earwig, the song is everything I could possibly want from a pop song: attitude, sex, hooks, a driving beat under a melodic wave. Impossibly fun. That was all it took, and I was in.

Somehow, the first time Gaga brought the Monster Ball through town (July 2010), the ticket sale got by us, and we didn’t get to the table until the show was already sold out. I was genuinely disappointed. Fast forward a few months and it’s announced that the tour that started in 2009 was finally coming to a close after a third North American leg. The third to last show – and the last North American performance – was scheduled for Northeast Ohio. I was buried in work when the announcement came out and had no idea, but when I turned 40 last October, Tracy surprised me with a pair of tickets to the encore Cleveland performance!

The entire event – from the moment we arrived downtown to the walk back to the car four and a half hours later – was encased in fun surreality. Just driving to the parking deck provided plenty of visual cues that this was no ordinary night in front of us. It was like Halloween had arrived six months early. Say what you will about them, Gaga’s fans are devoted. And they put it on display in every way imaginable. Regardless of gender, there was plenty of bubble and Saran Wrap, hot pants, fishnets, leather, caution tape, beer can rollers, face paint, wigs, and the pelts of a thousand dead Muppets. It was a glorious spectacle.

While hanging out in the main concourse of The Q before the show, I told Tracy that as much as anything else I was struck by the sense of community among the fans Gaga has dubbed her “Little Monsters.” It reminded me of the punk scene we belonged to back in the day. There was a freedom to look how you wanted to look; be who you wanted to be. I didn’t see a single person hassled at the show for how they looked or what they chose to flaunt.

Announcing around 9pm that “We are Semi Precious Weapons from New York mother fucking City, and we hope you all get laid!” the supporting act took the stage. It has been a long time since an opening act I was completely unfamiliar with moved me, but SPW did it. With the ferocity of vintage PiL Johnny Rotten and all the theatricality of Freddie Mercury, Justin Tranter was the consummate front man. While they are the “filthy party band” they claim to be, that description falls short in defining who they are. Songs like “Semi Precious Weapons” (with the unforgettable opening line: “I can’t pay my rent, but I’m fucking gorgeous!”), and “Put a Diamond In It” were catchy as hell and hard-edged as any alternative rocker. Tranter played the crowd masterfully, telling them “You know why we love Cleveland? Two reasons: 1) You bitches love rock and roll, and 2) you like to drink!” before launching into “Sticky with Champagne”. The playful 30+ minute set was the most fun I’ve had with an unknown opening act in years, and I was left wanting more. And about an hour later, I got the “more” I needed in the form of Gaga.

After much delay, Gaga took the stage at 10:30pm and moved through four set changes, 18 songs, and innumerable costume alterations over the following two hours. While calling the Little Monsters a “spectacle” may seem like an overstatement, the word doesn’t even come close to describing the show itself. The woman is a showman first and foremost, clearly determined to give her fans their money’s worth. The idea of a storyline doesn’t exactly hold up in execution, but on paper Gaga and her dancers are trying to get from the seediest side of NYC to the Monster Ball by way of subway and some sort of fucked-up Narnia.

Each set change was preceded by movie shorts projected on a giant stage-covering scrim that showed things like Gaga gnawing on a heart, and Gaga being covered by a green paint spewing girl. All the clichéd arena rock trappings were present... repeated name checks of the city, high theatrics, pointing out a song she wrote in Cleveland, and pyrotechnics.

The second quarter of the show (the subway sequence) included an explicit shout-out to her “Cleveland gays” in the intro to “Boys Boys Boys” before ripping through a great version of the song. Shortly thereafter, Gaga called one of her fans in the arena from the stage. It played out in the exact mix of sincerity and mawkishness you’d expect: the fan’s adoration getting a little uncomfortable and Gaga’s reciprocation equally offbeat, but extricating herself from the call was clever genius. Gaga told the fan she had another call coming in from Beyonce and launched into “Telephone”.

This was followed by an extended piano version of “Born This Way” (complete with a rambling monologue about her never being able to ever prove to the fans how much she loves them and how much she’s been through and how being there is just a dream come true and that fans should remember her story if they ever feel down and on and on and you get the picture). She stayed at the piano for another new song, “You and I”, that she said she wrote last summer in Cleveland and that Brian May of Queen played guitar on for the new album.

The second half of the show (the fucked-up forest and the finale) was packed with hits and undeniably catchy songs. Beginning with “Teeth” and barreling through “Alejandro”, “Poker Face”, “Paparazzi”, “Bad Romance”, and “Born This Way”, Gaga delivered on every level.

"Born This Way" is more than the name of her current single and forthcoming album. I'm not sure if Gaga is a marketing shill or genuinely believes in her own words, but the way she wove the idea of being "born this way" into the entire show, it was clearly the theme of the night. She couldn't go more than a few minutes between reminding her Little Monsters that either she was or they were born this way. She even played two versions of the song: the midpoint piano version and the single-song encore full-blown version.

While it's easy to question her musical originality – one listen to the new single or "Dance In the Dark" and it's clear Gaga’s no stranger to Madonna's songbook – the uniqueness of her character is undeniable. Gaga is as much an icon today for both her persona and music as Madonna was at the peak of her relevancy. But, thinking back on the ’80s, Madge’s shock value seemed to be derived from shock for marketing’s sake, whereas Gaga’s meat dresses and general exhibition seem to come from a somewhat less contrived place – feeling like a more natural extension of the act. By the same token, Gaga is as much a part of Bono’s legacy in her fearlessness of using her status for socially active promotion as she is Madonna’s. Between the opening act and the main set a video was played of the performer urging fans to text donations to charities that help GLBT kids who’ve been forced out of their homes because they were (yes, here it comes again) born this way, and a donation was made in the name of the fan she called during the show to a charity that offers support to gay kids.

Last year, I saw bits of Gaga's Oprah interview online and was struck by what appeared to be a cross between genuine appreciation for her fans and radical insecurity. In concert, Gaga is prone to bouts of over-emotion that manifest themselves unexpectedly in the middle of songs or while half-naked on a piano bench. These eruptions were uncomfortably raw, often rambling monologues about never being able to repay the fans for believing in her and how far she has come and to, basically, don't let the bastards bring you down.

It certainly appears Gaga takes her position as inspiration and role model for the gays and freaks and misfits of the world seriously, and that seems to be where these emotional outbursts originate. The result is an R rated old-time gospel tent revival, an Up With People-positive production slathered in sex for the 21-and-over crowd.

Punk Schmaltz

2011-02-21T11:27:00.005-05:00

When Dookie broke, there were rumblings from Green Day’s northern California punk brethren that they had sold out and had become corporate, mainstream whores. Green Day denied it, and I think they were justified in that denial at the time. But I have to wonder what their contemporaries would think if they attended one of the stops on Green Day’s American Idiot tour.

Admittedly, I wrote off Dookie as, well… dookie. But I eventually picked up their greatest hits collection and then got the brilliant American Idiot when it was released. And the more I listened, the more I was convinced that Green Day were the latter-day Clash. In 2004, Green Day mattered, at a time when very few artists did. And they knew their history: The album is rife with overt references to the likes of the Who, Bowie, and Mott the Hoople. Much like the Clash, they're not afraid to trot out their album collection and put their influences out there, as well as their politics.

Taking its activist and socially conscience tone from “Minority,” a single off their immediately previous album, American Idiot is a fierce indictment against the second Bush administration, the war in Iraq, and the neo-cons of the Religious Right. It contains bold statements of conviction. Lines of songs – like “Maybe I am the faggot America / I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” from the title track, and “Pulverize the Eiffel towers / Who criticize your government” from “Holiday” – drip with contempt and irony that amount to landing a kick somewhere slightly south of the Bible Belt. And the political Left doesn’t make it out of the fray unscathed either, as the band takes a swipe at the John Kerry’s of the world (remember him?) with the “Holiday” line: “Hear the drum pounding out of time / Another protester has crossed the line / To find the money’s on the other side.”

I have been to my fair share of punk shows and seen footage of the Clash live, but nothing prepared me for what I saw one night in May 2005. When I got my tickets for the American Idiot tour stop at the Wolstein Center on the edge of the Cleveland State University campus, I had visions of attending a punk show. I did not get what I expected. What I got was Def Leppard pyrotechnics and a Britney Spears audience. The show opened with five of the first six songs off of American Idiot… but they were peppered with “1-2, 1-2-3-4’s” and “Hey-O” call and responses. As if channeling all the 70’s arena rockers who influenced them, Green Day offered numerous call-outs to Cleveland and lyric changes to incorporate the hometown. Flashpots lit up the stage, synchronized with songs and illuminating the arena. The satiric pinnacle was the cover of Queen’s “We are the Champions” during the encore, complete with lyrics flashing on the giant curtain of lights so the kids too young to know them could sing along. It was clichéd and schmaltzy. And it would have worked beautifully for me on an ironic level, if not for being surrounded by girls less than half my age screaming and crying in N*Sync-like joy at attending their first concert – with their mom’s and dad’s in tow – turning the evening’s proceedings into a wholly surreal affair.

While I was surprised by how much I enjoyed hearing the older material live, I would have preferred Green Day to play the American Idiot album in its entirety – straight through, in order, and uninterrupted. There is a ferociousness to the American Idiot material – a combination of urgency and (what seemed like at the time) timelessness that is still compelling. In spite of the arena rock trappings, the conviction found on the album arrived in tact when translated to the live show, and was surprisingly coupled with an earnestness in its delivery. And while I think the message came across very well to the crowd, I almost wanted more political statements throughout the show to ensure the kids understand just how important it is, that it’s worth giving a damn about, and that they have the power to influence it. I appreciated frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s political comments that peppered the show and that he closed the show urging everyone in the venue to get out and make a difference. But, if you’re going to neuter your stage presence to the point where a punk show is a semi-political family-friendly event – you might as well pour it on a little thicker.

I remember this being one of the first shows where it struck me just how much concert going has changed. Before the Information Age, you had no idea what to expect when you attended a concert. Things like what the band would perform, stage setups, etc. were all a part of the great unknown. Now, with the interweb, if you choose to look you can find the set list, the stage setup, the pre-show music, reviews, and even how often the songs have been performed on that particular tour.

Going into the evening, I knew all about the big pink bunny, “YMCA”, the theme from 2001, the set list and order, the making a band bit during “Knowledge”, the “King for a Day/Shout” routine, that “Minority” would be the last song of the main set, and that a solo version of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Armstrong would close the encore.

I’m torn on this spoiler knowledge. Part of me misses the sense of unknown and anticipation that going to a show used to generate. There was a sense of “this show is just for me” and, by virtue of not knowing what was done or played at other shows, a sense that what we were seeing was truly a unique experience. Does all this knowledge at our fingertips detract from the overall feel of the show? Maybe, but despite all that knowledge going in, by virtue of their charisma and apparent genuine appreciativeness of performing, I still felt the Green Day show I saw that Friday night in Cleveland was unique and personal and worth both my time and money.

So, is Green Day still a punk band? Are they worthy of Clash comparisons? On disc, the answer is a fairly decisive “yes.” Based on the incarnation of their live show I witnessed six years ago, the answer is a bit more of a shoulder shrug and a half-hearted “sure.”

Piano Man-ish

2011-02-14T07:34:00.000-05:00

Michael Cavanaugh in Concert: The Music of Billy Joel and More!, with the Akron Symphony Orchestra (Conducted by Christopher Wilkins)
12 February 2011: EJ Thomas Hall, Akron, Ohio

I almost saw Billy Joel in concert once. It was August 1994 and Central Florida was being brutalized by a nasty storm. My buddy John was working, so his then-girlfriend (someday-to-be wife) Jenn and I decided to head over to the Citrus Bowl and see about picking up some scalped tickets for the Billy Joel/Elton John show that night. We circled the stadium in my 1983 Honda Civic for what seemed like hours in sheets of rain. People showing up for this open air show already looked miserable and drowned. I don’t know that Jenn and I ever even ended up getting out of the car that night. We – wisely, I think – abandoned our quest.

I’m not a huge Billy Joel or Elton John fan, but I like both of these artists and still wouldn’t mind seeing either of them live at some point. Born in 1970 and raised a child of the ’80s, there is something familiar and comforting about their music.

I had never heard of Michael Cavanaugh prior to Tracy weaving her contest winning magic. Courtesy of 91.3 The Summit, she came up with a pair of tickets to see Cavanaugh at EJ Thomas Hall, and after some cursory digging about the show, we figured it sounded like a potentially good time.

We discovered Cavanaugh was handpicked by Joel to star in the Broadway production of Movin’ Out and has since continued to cash in on that ticket. I would never begrudge him that, but Tracy and I both came away from the show Saturday night a little disappointed in Cavanaugh probably because of the expectations that path to stardom and endorsement entail.

Cavanaugh is from Northeast Ohio, which is cool. My civic pride swells a bit more every time local people do well. But the link goes deeper than that. Cavanaugh’s first full time musician gig was at the Blazing Pianos bar in Orlando. If I’m reading his biography right, he worked there during the same time I was living there. That means there’s a pretty good chance I saw him perform once or twice back in the day, having spent a few nights in my twenties at the various piano bars around Orlando with friends.

Regardless of any cool connections, it’s hard to get past the execution of Cavanaugh’s symphony orchestra collaboration. It’s a case of the performer being crushed under the expectations set by the hype. Tracy and I anticipated more from Cavanaugh’s voice and stage presence based on what we’d read about him. I thought his saxophone player John Scarpulla had more charisma, and it was impossible not to watch his drummer (another Northeast Ohio native, and who played the drummer in Almost Famous) Johnny Fedevich play.

The selections were interesting, in that many times the band only seemed to play parts of songs and often resorted to medleys of Joel songs. The best Joel song of the night was, by far, “Goodnight Saigon”. Cavanaugh’s cover of Elton John’s cover of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” was also interesting. When he covered Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”, Tracy and I both went into full ’80s pop culture overload and could only think of Dennis Quaid, Top Gun, and Back to the Future. Sad, I know.

The two orchestra only pieces from Joel’s 2001 classical album, Fantasies & Delusions – “Opus 2. Waltz #1 (‘Nunley’s Carosel’)” and “Opus 10. Air (‘Dublinesque’)” – were excellent. As was their work during the cover of Joel’s “Pressure”. As a bonus, it was cool to see our son’s drum instructor – second chair percussion with the orchestra – do his thing.

The night struck me as striving to fall somewhere between the artist/orchestra collaboration of Pink Martini and the Cleveland Orchestra we saw a year ago, and the Beatles cover band perfection of RAIN last month. But Cavanaugh never quite succeeded on either front. The Akron Symphony Orchestra deserves a lot of credit for their efforts, but Cavanaugh’s song selection didn’t lend itself well to interpretation. And Cavanaugh wasn’t a close enough approximation of Joel or Elton or any of the others he covered (vocally or from a stage presence perspective) to put him anywhere near the caliber of RAIN.

Regardless, though, I had a nice night out with my wife. And I almost saw Billy Joel in concert once.

Come Together

2011-01-25T08:25:00.018-05:00

RAIN – A Tribute to the Beatles
23 January 2011: EJ Thomas Hall, Akron, Ohio

Honestly, when we purchased our season subscription to Broadway in Akron, none of us were entirely sure what RAIN was, other than something involving the Beatles. Although, in reality, it’s nothing more than a tribute band show, that’s selling it a bit short.

I find it fascinating that the Broadway reviews of RAIN all seem to talk about it being another way for aging baby boomers to relive the glory days of the Beatles and their catalog. While the show at EJ Thomas Hall was primarily boomers, there was a healthy 19-and-under contingent in attendance – including my kiddo. Tracy has been under the weather, so I took Jack with me. He’s been to concerts before (The Black Keys, Bob Dylan, Jake Shimabukuro), he’s been to theater productions before, and he digs the Beatles, but this was a funky little mix of all those things.

Beginning with their arrival on American soil for the historic Ed Sullivan Show appearance and using the musicians’ costume changes as signposts, the show moves in rough chronological order through the Beatles career. And, as proven repeatedly throughout the years, it’s difficult to find a Beatles tune that isn’t instantly recognizable, so nearly every song was a sing-along affair.

In the same way it’s difficult to comprehend how The Greatest Generation literally saved the world, I struggle to wrap my head around just how seismic the musical paradigm shift was when the Beatles arrived. In context of the times, it’s amazing to think about these teenagers’ minds being completely blown by an aesthetic and sound that had never been seen or heard previously, and what that experience must have been like. I don’t know that there will ever be another popular cultural revolution like it. You could argue things like the rise of personal computers or the internet, but those weren’t specific moments in time to our collective conscience. We can accurately point to the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan as the exact instant at which music changed.

The timelessness of the Beatles catalog is as impressive as its near-universal familiarity. The entire hall was rocking throughout, singing along, clapping, people standing up and dancing. While perhaps not as fervent as a true Beatles show back in the day, the night crackled with energy.

The sparse sets were unobtrusive, with the focus primarily on the musicians and music, and the three projection screens to enhance the experience. From the Ed Sullivan period, the performers took the audience through the Shea Stadium concert, the Sgt. Pepper era, the Abbey Road and rooftop concert years, and more.

The Fab Four of RAIN did a great job approximating their respective Beatles. Our seats were just far enough away to help maintain the illusion that they just might have been the real Beatles up on the stage. Along with our John, Paul, George, and Ringo, there is also a fifth on stage each night on keyboards to supplement the show. In the RAIN franchise there are three to four different John, Paul, George, and Ringos who tour or perform on Broadway, along with a pair of keyboardists. In a nice hometown touch, our “Paul” was a Northeast Ohio native, Robert “Mac” Ruffing.

With half of the original group now gone and already multiple generations past the group’s working period, it’s easier to make the argument for this tribute band than for something like a KISS or Aerosmith tribute band because there is simply no other way to hear Beatles music live. And while I’m sure it’s possible, you’d have to work pretty hard to come up with a crappy setlist. (Although the kiddo desperately wanted RAIN to play “Yellow Submarine” – they didn’t. But I think the “When I’m 64” sing-along helped smooth things over for him.) I guess you’re pretty much guaranteed a standing ovation if you’re doing it right, and that’s just what the cast of RAIN got when they came through Akron.

First Communion

2011-01-20T09:07:00.009-05:00

The first concert concert I attended was David Lee Roth at the Richfield Coliseum. I went to the show with Courtney. I don’t remember her last name. She was a few years older than me and had just moved to the school district. My dad was in the local Lions Club chapter and I believe Courtney’s dad joined when they moved to our area. I seem to recall meeting her at one of our dads’ Lions Club family functions.

My musical tastes and my parents’ rarely cross, but especially then. My older sister Karen was into popular music – I remember her going to Rick Springfield and Jack Wagner and Corey Hart concerts in high school, all pretty tame. I am, however, grateful for the music Karen exposed me to and my subsequent appreciation for early ’80s pop music. From there, though, I moved on to a cocktail of hard rock and classic rock, a fairly natural progression for mid-’80s Midwestern adolescent. Rush, Boston, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, The Doors, Mötley Crüe, Led Zeppelin, and, of course, Van Halen.

I was a huge Van Halen fan in middle school and early high school. While I was ok with the Van Hagar incarnation (and saw them a couple of years later headline the Monsters of Rock Tour), it was the original lineup that always made me giddy. And, although Diamond Dave’s output took a nosedive after Eat ‘Em and Smile, that first solo album was a lot of fun.

With the Eat ‘Em and Smile concert just days before my sixteenth birthday and that I was going with someone older my parents seemed to trust, they relented and let me go. I don’t remember too much about the concert, to be honest. I vaguely remember the glam (now seemingly camp) metal group Cinderella opening for Roth. They had a few songs with videos that were in fairly heavy rotation on MTV that were up my alley at the time.

The now-long gone Richfield Coliseum was a cinderblock affair set in the middle of nowhere, about 20 miles south of Cleveland, and the only venue in Northeast Ohio outside of the Blossom Music Center amphitheater nearby in Cuyahoga Falls. These venues would be the site of the bulk of my mainstream concert-going activities until discovering modern rock/college radio acts in the late ’80s and the smaller downtown Cleveland stages they hung about.

Courtney got our tickets. Our seats were probably about two-thirds of the way down the floor, on an aisle, next to the front corner of the mixing board. The metal folding chair may or may not have been red cushioned, but even 25 years later I can recall that feeling of heady excitement standing on the deathtrap, straining for the best possible view of Diamond Dave while doing my best to not lose my balance and be eaten by the chair Snoopy style à la A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Much like Cinderella’s set, I couldn’t tell you specifics about what Roth and his band played that night. I don’t remember any of Steve Vai’s solos or Billy Sheehan’s playing. What I do remember was being struck by the somehow intimate experience of sharing the night with 20,000 strangers. And that communal feeling extended beyond the night of the show. I remember buying my first concert t-shirt and wearing it to school the next day. I was suddenly in a club – exclusive to those that had been to a rock show, a concert at the Coliseum. I had credibility of sorts. It was a very cool feeling.

Courtney and I never really became good friends beyond that show. We hung out very little, and I lost track of her quickly after she graduated. I had heard stories of where she ended up and rumors of rough times she stumbled on, but I will always be grateful for her role in finally getting me to my first rock show.

I may not be a huge David Lee Roth fan these days, but that first experience of witnessing music I love live – the raw power, the transcending energy, the sense of community – was transformative. For a kid to whom music was so important to anyway, the live experience forever altered how I both perceive and listen to music.

When Music Matters Most

2011-01-17T10:08:00.005-05:00

My blog post on The Cure’s Disintegration has prompted some great feedback via comments, Twitter, and email. One of those personal emails was from my good friend and musical confidant Jeff. I’m of the mind that if he had intended for the contents of the email to be shared with a wider audience, he would have sent it as a comment on the blog, but there are some sentiments in his email that I think are worth exploring a bit and using as a jumping off point.

Jeff agreed with my observations on the importance of specific albums being tied to the fervor of one’s fandom at the time of its release, as well as the ties between songs and memories. But to me, his most interesting observation was that “all of the really memorable and important albums [in his life] are from high school and college.”

This is an idea I have always maintained. I wear my sentimentality on my sleeve, and I have no problem looking backwards in order to understand my present. There is something to be said about that period in your life – college in particular, that carries immense weight in shaping who we become as adults.

Jeff and John and I all went to college together, and they, along with Jen and Erin, were my closest friends that freshman year at Bowling Green. John and I have talked at length about the importance of the first year of college. Never before or after in one’s life do we find ourselves away from home for the first time, thrown into a hyper-real mini-society that combines all the cliquishness of high school with the quasi-responsibility of young adulthood. Everything is dramatic. Every decision is the Most. Important. Decision. Ever.

Because of this, at least among my friends it seems, the music of that era is imparted with more significance than music from any other time in our lives. Meeting and dating my wife, getting married. All arguably more significant periods in my life, and music accompanied them all, but not in the way it did when I was 18 and 19 years-old. I have mentioned before how U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the only album I can think of that entered my adult consciousness with anywhere near the importance of the music from my youth.

Last year, I wrote about that significance this way in a blog post about Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine: “The closest any other album has ever come to being as fundamentally meaningful to a period in my life is U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Released just after my 30th birthday at the end of 2000, this collection of songs became the soundtrack to our return to Ohio after ten years away, our trip to Paris, the birth of our son, our friendship with Jeff and Anna, our post-9/11 trip to New York City in December 2001, and on and on. But it was different, in that this was a collective soundtrack for experiences Tracy and I shared. And if you’re lucky, your thirties inhabit a very different worldview from that of your 19-year-old self.”

From a practical perspective, I don’t think we consume music in the same way we once did. Listening to Disintegration over and over as I was writing about the album, I recognized that as each song was ending I knew instinctively the next song’s opening notes. I anticipated them, and took comfort in that familiarity. I think that comes from being a product of the last generation to listen to music on LPs and cassette tapes. There was no “shuffle” or downloaded singles. It wasn’t until compact discs that we had a random play option outside of mix tapes (which, of course, are set playlists anyway). And now with digital downloads we live in a singles driven, “album optional” world.

While the way music is consumed affects what is listened to (i.e., our downloadable world lends itself to singles versus whole albums), that doesn’t diminish the importance of the music to today’s youth. I’m sure they are hit just as hard by “their” music today as we were at the same age by “our” music.

Canadian Mash-Up

2011-01-10T07:58:00.001-05:00

The other week, there was a parking and traffic mess in trying to get the kiddo to and from his drum lessons on the campus of the University of Akron because there was an event across the street at EJ Thomas Hall that night. On the way off campus, I finally saw the marquee and realized Sarah McLachlan was performing that night, which immediately transported me back 13 years to a concert Tracy and I attended at the University of Central Florida.

We went through a stretch there in the late ’90s where Tracy was winning every flipping contest she entered! Didn’t matter if it was a radio call-in, or at our local CD store, or drawings, or whatever. If Tracy threw her name in the hat, it inevitable was the one selected. We had dinner and VIP tickets to see Duncan Sheik and Lisa Loeb at the Atlantic Dance Club at Disney’s Boardwalk; we saw the Wallflowers at the Hard Rock Café; we attended New Year’s Eve at Disney’s Pleasure Island with Joan Jett and Men at Work that included a night’s stay at the Contemporary resort and limo service to and from Pleasure Island. It was crazy how she scored over and over with these contests.

The particular contest tied to Sarah McLachlan was through Disc Go Round. I don’t know if they are still around, but they were a sort of used CD store franchise. “Ours” was on SR 50 in Colonial Plaza across from TooJay’s, one of our favorite eateries back in the day (and around the corner from Beefy King!). Tracy and I lived nearby in the Conway and Lake Underhill area of Orlando at the time. Because we had both worked at CD stores back in the day and have always been lovers of music, we would go to the store often and got to know the owner.

The cool thing about Disc Go Round (and, as I recall, CD Warehouse had a similar model but with less friendly staff) was that they were the first used CD store I had been to with listening stations. But unlike full booth style ones you used to have in old vinyl record stores, these were just multi-disc players set up on a kitchen bar type counter with barstools and headphones for each station. You could take the empty CD case to the staff and they would pull the corresponding disc and queue it up for you on the player. Tracy and I could waste all kinds of time there!

Tracy had entered the contest at the store because we wanted to see Barenaked Ladies. It’s rare for me to queue up the Barenaked Ladies anymore, but there was a time they were in heavy rotation. Tracy introduced me to their music, and we saw them perform numerous times around Orlando, including in the parking lot of the Hard Rock Café (they had a cool concert series at the time that was cheap and fun and took advantage of the weather). Tracy ended up winning the tickets, and we were treated to one of the most peculiar line-ups we’d ever come across. We joked it was an odd sort of Great White North bill, with Chicago’s Freddy Jones Band opening (who we had, admittedly, never heard of before that night), followed by Canada’s Barenaked Ladies, and headlined by their then-label mate and fellow countrywoman Sarah McLachlan. At the time, she was huge, touring behind the Surfacing album and riding high off the success of the inaugural Lilith Fair music festival she had organized earlier that summer.

Tracy had McLachlan’s Solace, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and Surfacing, but we were clearly going to see Barenaked Ladies! We wanted jokey, goofy, Kraft Cheese throwing fun! We were definitely in it for a good time. It was a cold December night in Central Florida, and the university is nowhere near where we lived. I remember finally getting to the venue after a long line of traffic snaked its way through campus and finding our seats. We weathered the Freddy Jones Band, then had a rollicking good time with Barenaked Ladies touring on Born On a Pirate Ship, and they were amazing.

Eventually, though, they finished their set and soon McLachlan took the stage and the entire tone of the night changed. Melancholy, wistful, longing, and lovely. Decidedly not what we had come for with the Barenaked Ladies set. Soon, some of the girls near us began shouting “We love you, Sarah!” It was, well, odd. Tracy and I hardly knew what to make of it initially, then we began to realize that we were surrounded almost entirely by college girls. Crunchy, granola college girls so overwhelmed with emotion they had tears running down their cheeks as they screamed in adoration.

We quickly figured out that “gay college girls” were a key demographic of McLachlan’s at the time. (Maybe still?) The combination of overwrought emotion and cries of love seemed to only grow as the show continued. Tracy and I ended up leaving the show early, maybe halfway through McLachlan’s set. We were just too unnaturally amused by this clearly odd mix of acts, the completely different tones of both their sets, and their core audiences. It was a strange, strange night.

Another Time Undone

2011-01-07T08:42:00.008-05:00

I finally got the deluxe edition of The Cure's Disintegration. It was a long time coming – both for the long-delayed album to finally be released last year and for me to actually get around to picking it up. As much as I love The Cure’s music up to that album, they peaked with Disintegration. Then everything changed after that: The ’80s were over, high school had ended, I left Ohio.

Originally released in May 1989, this was the sole Cure album to come out while I was deep (deep!) in my punk phase. And while I can and do love their other work like “A Few Hours After This…” and Pornography and “The Caterpillar” and Head on the Door and (especially) Faith, there is something to be said for the album that is released when you are actively a fan of a group that makes it that much more personal. Similarly, for example, Nine Inch Nails will never be as good as they were with Pretty Hate Machine, or Depeche Mode with Violator, to my ears.

Disintegration was the soundtrack to the end of my senior year of high school and that turbulent summer immediately after. My girlfriend at the time, the one who pushed me to explore my creative side and expand my musical tastes and really helped set me on the path to becoming the person I ultimately grew into, left me and moved to San Francisco to be with her ex-boyfriend (I never said the relationship was healthy), and I was left alone to process the emotional void.

The album was both the background against and inspiration for the bulk of my first real attempts at creative writing and poetry. That summer, I would go to the lone punk bar in Akron with my friends Jen and Nancy and others. We’d close the place down at 2am, then head over to the Country Kitchen on Arlington Road for sustenance. I’d come rolling into my parents’ house usually sometime after 3, put Disintegration on my stereo in the family room, and write until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more.

I wrote on unruled goldenrod yellow sheets of 8 ½ by 11 paper that came from I don’t know where. My weapon of choice was a fine tipped Sharpie. I had a manila folder that I had scrawled “Random Thoughts Escaping” across the cover (the masthead of this blog is a scan of that original folder turned into a negative). My first angst-y poetry collection. I wrote about all the things that were going on in my life, but primarily about the loss of love filtered through the dark and droning aesthetic of Disintegration.

Opening with the simultaneously crashing and swirling “Plainsong”, every last song on Disintegration is a masterpiece, epic in scope and often in length. From “Pictures of You” to “Last Dance” to “Prayers for Rain” to the thematically anachronistic “Lovesong” to “The Same Deep Water as You”, there isn’t a single song among the twelve that I wouldn’t consider brilliant, but “Closedown” and “Untitled” have always stood out for me.

The liner notes on the original album say “THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO BE PLAYED LOUD SO TURN IT UP,” and the opening tribal drums of “Closedown” are relentless. You feel them thrumming in your chest with urgency at any volume. The immediacy of those four minutes of music – one of the shortest songs on the album – is underscored with a mere 11 lines of lyrics compacted into 40 seconds of song, making every turn of phrase, every word matter. The lyrics are well within lead singer Robert Smith’s doom and gloom wheelhouse, but the music feels uncharacteristically hard. While Cure songs of the era are typically dense, “Closedown” actually seems to apply pressure, actively pushing the air out of the listener’s lungs, suffocating them.

The final track is by far my favorite of the album. To my young man’s sensibilities, it seemed so brazen to not name the song at all and simply refer to it as “Untitled”. Four short verses. No chorus to speak of. “Untitled” never meanders but isn’t too terribly fond of rigid song structure either. The words Smith crafts matched the then-fresh emotional wreckage of my ended relationship. With the exception of Cowboy Junkies’ “Dreaming My Dreams With You”, no other song completely encapsulates that feeling of loss I was experiencing the summer before college when my girlfriend and muse left me. I leaned on this album, and “Untitled”, in particular, to fuel my fevered scribblings.

My dad was a meat cutter for a local grocery store and worked horrible hours, either getting up at four in the morning or not having to go into work until the afternoon shift. My parents and I were barely speaking at the time – they didn’t understand the whole punk phase I was going through, and I was an unyielding 18-year-old – but on those early morning days, we’d often pass on the stairs, both of us bleary-eyed as one was heading to bed and the other heading to work.

The Cure didn’t come to Northeast Ohio behind Disintegration until just after I had moved on to Bowling Green for college, but I ended up being able to come home for the Prayer Tour stop at the Richfield Coliseum in late August. I had worked at a local used CD store in high school and the summer before college, continuing there on breaks from school. I attended the Cure show with Jen and Nancy, along with my CD store boss Ron and part-time co-worker Randy, whose full-time job was box office manager of the Coliseum. Thanks to him, we had front row, center floor seats, but it would have been an amazing show even if I’d had to watch from the rafters. The only downside was that although The Cure had The Pixies and Love and Rockets – two bands I love – opening for them on their west coast swing, we were stuck with Shelleyan Orphan.

Although I was moving on from the muse in San Francisco, the powerful connection between this album and those events wreaked havoc in me that night. I remember tearing up during “Untitled”, thrilled that they were playing such a deep album cut so important to me. It was a crazy night, and I remember being deposited afterwards in my dorm room on the other side of the state somewhat more worse for the wear, to be honest. I never saw The Cure live again, nor have any desire to.

The Cure never released another album as good as Disintegration. Wish swung far too much in the opposite direction, and the schizophrenic Wild Mood Swings was aptly named. The lone bright spot was the single “Wrong Number” off Galore, which hinted at late ’90s relevance.

Ten years after Disintegration, in an attempt to link a new album to the glory days, Smith stated 2000’s Bloodflowers was the final part of a retrofitted trilogy that includes the band’s brilliant works of Pornography and Disintegration. This manufactured concept always struck me as a George Lucas type move. “Oh, no. It was always subtitled ‘A New Hope!’” Right. Regardless, Bloodflowers was a return to form and hit me as I was turning 30 and returning to Ohio after a decade away. Succumbing to waves of nostalgia, I gave it a pass.

The Cure faded from relevance for good after that, both for me personally and, apparently, commercially with releases of The Cure and 4:13 Dream. I still love the old albums and listen to them fairly regularly. I can reliably queue up a Cure playlist and enjoy the music for what it is, but Disintegration I can also appreciate as an aural marker for some of the messiest stumbles along my path to young adulthood. Without regret.

Youthful Resolve

2011-01-06T08:17:00.001-05:00

The kiddo brought this home earlier this week for Tracy and me to sign. Thought it was a pretty awesome resolution, explaining both the problem and the consequences of not changing the behavior.

Plus, the drawing of the student crying because he’s getting bad grades is just priceless!

(click to enlarge)

Brothers In Arms

2011-01-05T21:02:00.007-05:00

So, that circle of friends I mentioned I ran with back in high school? Here we are on graduation day nearly 22 years ago. A motley crew if ever there was.

We were the Kings of Inside Jokes. I don’t remember who suggested it, but we decided to take out a “senior ad” in the back of the yearbook and simply list as many of our in-jokes as we could fit.

Once we hatched the idea, I started a handwritten list. Then I typed it all up and printed it out on a dot-matrix printer and circulated it among the group again to add anything else we’d overlooked. We crammed everything in there from Monty Python quotes to movie lines to references to ex-girlfriends and teachers to stupid stuff we’d done that had entered into our personal lore. Ultimately, it fell to yearbook editor John to sneak as much past the faculty advisors as possible. And, frankly, I don’t recall anything being cut from the ad – even blatant stuff like “Freddie Uncle Charlie Kate” made it through.

I have no intention of explaining any of these, but here is the ad scanned from my yearbook.

Storming the Fourth Estate

2011-01-04T08:14:00.006-05:00

When I was in high school, I wasn’t super popular, but I was well-known, I suppose. That comes with the territory when your mom is a teacher in the district and your older sister was captain of the cheerleading squad. My circle of friends was an interesting bunch. Among the five of us were the yearbook editor (John), the president of NHS (Giac), a football stud (Larry), the most uniquely creative person in school (Gary), and the editor of the school newspaper (me).

Ethics weren’t high on my list of things to strive towards, and I leveraged the hell out of that newspaper editor position for personal gain, including giving my best friend his own column – Scribblings by John Booth. My favorite of his columns was one that chronicled our trip to the Akron-Canton Airport to cover then-Vice President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign stop.

There was a lot going on around the whole rally. John and I used to play racquetball on a regular basis (The physical resiliency of youth is amazing. Consider this: at 18 I had a pack-a-day cigarette habit, but played racquetball weekly. Ah, to be young and stupid.), and on one particular outing we had either picked the press passes up just before playing or received them earlier in the day. We stopped at the mall after racquetball for smoothies as we sometimes did and had the passes with us. We were giddy and amazed that we, two high school kids, had been issued press credentials for a presidential rally. I stepped away from the table for something and when I returned, John informed me that the two girls at the next table were asking about me and for my name. John, inspired by the press passes in front of him, told them my name was “George.” And, according to John, their response was to coo “Georgie.”

More scheming went into just getting to go to the rally, let alone not have to ride with the band on their bus. The faculty newspaper advisor gave me a lot of leeway with things – to my ultimate detriment, I suppose – and I was able to sell her on the idea that both John and I needed to attend this event. I’m sure part of our reasoning was that our high school’s marching band was selected to perform at the rally. Of course, the only coverage we actually gave the band in the paper was some passing mentions in John’s column. There was also a lot of effort behind convincing the principal to let us take my car. I was initially surprised rereading John’s account of things to learn we didn’t pull that off until the day of the event. But in retrospect, I think we planned it that way to not give the administration much time to debate our reasoning – we were taking one of our parents’ good cameras and we certainly couldn’t take that on the bus with the band and risk it getting broken. (wink, wink!) I was also surprised at how much of our shenanigans John alluded to in his column that I allowed published. I mean, in theory we could have gotten into trouble for some of the scamming we did if the administration wanted to pursue it.

We froze our bits off in the hangar waiting for the Vice President, but I have very fond memories of everything about that day, including going over to John’s house immediately afterward to heat up leftover beef stroganoff and peas and watch those old episodes of Mission: Impossible and chatter away about how cool the whole experience was and that we had honest-to-goodness press passes and how about those Secret Service agents and, man, did you see how hot that national news chick was and can you believe we talked the principal into letting us take my car and it was your job to remember where we parked and, holy cow, was it ever cold!

A week later I voted for the first time in a presidential election, but that’s not what I remember about politics in the Fall of 1988. It was the heady experience of a high school senior and his best buddy at a presidential campaign stop posing as journalists; no matter how much of a sham it all was on our part.

And I can still corroborate John’s assessment of that national news chick. It may have been cold that fall Ohio day, but she was hot.

(click to enlarge)

At the Turning of the Year...

2011-01-03T20:22:00.008-05:00

I have no real complaints about how things went in 2010, but my lack of reflection on events or the significance of anniversaries is odd for me. This year I finally was able to really reconnect with my oldest son who grew up in Florida. It marked the 10th anniversary of Tracy’s and my move back to Ohio after a decade away. And we celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary and my 40th birthday. Yet, for some reason, I have struggled with writing – or even journaling – about these events and milestones. I have been out of sorts for months really. Freelance writing job deadlines sandwiched between a family vacation in August and a month of work travel in October threw me completely off my game.

There has been plenty to chronicle, but the last half of the year knocked me out of any sort of writing routine. If this were any other year I would have been reflecting on my blog and in my personal writing, talking endlessly about how much more of a milestone turning 30 felt like ten years ago than turning 40 did this past year. I’d be exploring my thirties and how they treated me and what I hope for from my forties. Our August trip included Star Wars Celebration V, and warrants a write-up that I have yet to find the motivation to tackle.

There was the piece I started to write about the tenth anniversary of the release of U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and the importance of that album on me. My “End of the Eighties” track-by-track review was sidelined by my own distractions, and I never really recovered. There were book reviews and thoughts on comics and all other sorts of pop culture seeds that were planted but never really took root over the last half of the year.

The reconnection with my son Mikee has been amazingly rewarding, but the emotional experience for our family is incredibly personal. Not necessarily something appropriate for the wider audience. We are blessed to have him in our lives again and able to share this new chapter together. There are things to be recorded, but form and format are a curious animal I’ve yet to get my arms around.

I guess if I have a new year’s resolution, it’s to get back to writing regularly. Writing for me, for my family, for my friends and extended family. Finding my voice again and using it, whether it’s a personal journal entry, a blog post, a letter to a loved one, or organizing book ideas.

Book List 2010

2010-12-29T12:13:00.008-05:00

Non-Fiction

The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 - John Farmer (Not as good as I was hoping for.)
Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin - Kathy Griffin (Fantastic read from one of my favorite performers!)
I am the New Black - Tracy Morgan with Anthony Bozza (Ditto.)
Shooting Stars - LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger
The U2 Reader: A Quarter Century of Commentary, Criticism, and Reviews - Hank Bordowitz (A re-read. Whenever I need some music journalism inspiration, this is always a good pick-me-up.)
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime - John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (A page-turner, though it really focused on the Democrats and kept McCain and Palin as footnotes, and I was hoping for a complete picture across the aisle.)
The Happiest Days of Our Lives (audio) - Wil Wheaton (I have read this book and listened to the audiobook many times, though I admit I probably prefer his keynote address at PAX better than anything else he’s written or performed.)
Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled over the Marvel Comics Empire - And Both Lost - Dan Raviv (Was hoping for a comic industry version of Storming the Magic Kingdom and was really let down. Had to slog through this one.)
The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks - Nicole Laporte (A nice coda to DisneyWar.)
Lips Unsealed: A Memoir - Belinda Carlisle (I couldn’t put this book down. Fantastic read.)
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut - Rob Sheffield (My first Sheffield book. Amazing.)
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebooook – A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal - Ben Mezrich (Like most of Mezrich's books, perhaps this book should have been on my “fiction” list instead?)
Just Kids - Patti Smith (The story of the friendship between Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorp is stunningly beautiful. Cannot recommend this book highly enough.)
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son - Michael Chabon (Chabon’s books have never taken hold of me like this one did.)
Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne (An interesting take on sustainable transportation from former Talking Heads frontman.)

Fiction

A Gentleman’s Game: A Queen & Country Novel - Greg Rucka (I loves me some Q&C.)
Lost Horizon - James Hilton (A classic. One of my all-time favorite novels.)
Night of the Living Trekkies - Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall (I was skeptical of this one, but ended up not being able to put it down.)
Flawed Dogs: The Shocking Raid on Westminster - Berkeley Breathed (Oh, how I miss Bloom County. But this was a nice reminder of the magic Mr. Breathed is capable of.)

Trade Paperbacks and Hardcover Collected Editions

Spider-Man: Blue - Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
Hulk: Gray - Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
X-Men and Spider-Man - Christos Gage and Mario Alberti
Marvel Divas - Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Tonci Zonjic
Marvel 1602: New World/Fantastick Four - Greg Pak and Peter David
Queen & Country: Definitive Collection, Volume 3 - Greg Rucka (Another fantastic volume!)
Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin - Joe Casey and Eric Canete
Wolverine First Class: The Rookie - Fred Van Lente
The Immortal Iron Fist Omnibus - Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja (Possibly my favorite Christmas present from my wife last year, and maybe the best omni Marvel has produced.)
DC and Marvel Present: Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk - Len Wein, Jose Garcia Lopez, Dick Giordano
Afrodisiac - Jim Rugg, Brian Maruca (A must read!)
Daredevil Omnibus, Volume 2 - Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev (Bendis and Maleev’s run on DD is topped only by Frank Miller’s legendary run.)
Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. - Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen
Air, Volume 2: Flying Machine - G. Willow Wilson, M.K. Perker (Meh. I ended up skipping volume 3 altogether.)
Dead @ 17: Afterbirth - Josh Howard (I’m a sucker for this series. Always a fun read!)
Spider-Man: The Death of the Stacys - Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, John Romita, Sr., Gil Kane
Batman: Year One, Deluxe Edition - Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli (Wow.)
Robot Dreams - Sara Varon (Wonderful storytelling.)
The Astounding Wolf-Man, Volume 2 - Robert Kirkman, Jason Howard
New Avengers/Transformers - Stuart Moore
Cloak & Dagger: Child of Darkness, Child of Light - Bill Mantlo, Rick Leonardi (A key limited series from my childhood that has stood the test of time.)
The Losers, Volumes One & Two - Andy Diggle and Jock
Empowered, Volume 1 - Adam Warren (Fun read!)
Uncanny X-Men: Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire - Ed Brubaker (I love so much of Brubaker’s work, but this left me a little cold.)
Star Wars Adventures, Volume 1: Luke Skywalker and the Treasure of the Dragonsnakes - Tom Taylor (Fun stuff recommended by my kiddo.)
Star Wars: Tag & Bink Were Here - Kevin Rubio, Lucas Marangon (Again, one of my kiddo’s favorites!)
Mercury and the Murd - Shawn Pryor, Chad Cicconi, Dave Dwonch
Athena Voltaire: Flight of the Falcon - Steve Bryant, Paul Daly
Blacklisted - Adam Witt, Pat Loika
Star Wars: Infinities, A New Hope – Various (Another recommendation from my kiddo.)
Nova, Volume 3: Secret Invasion - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
Nova, Volume 4: Nova Corps - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 1: Legacy - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
Catwoman: Crime Pays - Will Pfeifer, David Lopez, Alvaro Lopez
Ms. Marvel, Volume 4: Monster Smash - Brian Reed
The Walking Dead, Book Five - Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn (The brilliant series continues.)
Indiana Jones Omnibus: The Further Adventures, Volume 2 - Various (Childhood revisited.)
Daredevil - Visionaries: Frank Miller, Volume 2 - Frank Miller (Re-read it for the Elektra piece I wrote for an upcoming issue of Back Issue. So entertaining. This is the best DD has ever been.)
Daredevil - Visionaries: Frank Miller, Volume 3 - Frank Miller (Ditto.)
Super-Villain Team-Up: MODOK’s 11 - Fred Van Lente, Francis Portela
Ms. Marvel, Volume 5: Secret Invasion - Brian Reed
Elektra Omnibus - Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz (Another Christmas present from my wife last year. Amazing.)
Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition, Book Three - Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra (A must-read series!)
Avengers: Hawkeye - Mark Gruenwald (More of my childhood reading captured for posterity. Probably my favorite four-issue limited series of the ’80s.)
Avengers: West Coast Avengers Assemble - Roger Stern
Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle - David Michelinie and Bob Layton
Powers: The Definitive Hardcover Collection, Volume 3 - Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Avon Oeming
Star Wars Adventures, Volume 4: The Will of Darth Vader - Tom Taylor (Another kiddo recommendation.)
Spider-Man: The Gauntlet, Volume 1 - Various
Ms. Marvel, Volume 6: Ascension - Brian Reed
The Astounding Wolf-Man, Volume 3 - Robert Kirkman, Jason Howard
Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story - Mat Johnson and Simon Gane (A captivating story.)
Proof, Book 1: Goatsucker - Alexander Grecian and Riley Rossmo (Recommended by my friend Vince and others. Enjoyed every volume of it!)
Proof, Book 2: The Company of Men - Alexander Grecian and Riley Rossmo
Proof, Book 3: Thunderbirds Are Go! - Alexander Grecian and Riley Rossmo
The Invincible Iron Man, Volume 1 - Matt Fraction, Salvador Larroca
The Avengers: Vision and the Scarlet Witch – A Year in the Life - Steve Englehart
Revolver - Matt Kindt
The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects - Mike Mignola (One of the best books of the year. Period.)
New Avengers: Luke Cage - Town Without Pity - John Arcudi
Dan Dare - Garth Ennis, Gary Erskine
Chew, Volume 2: International Flavor - John Layman, Rob Guillory
Spider-Man: The Gauntlet, Volume 2 - Various (Not as good as the first or third volumes.)
Marvel Essential: Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, Volume 3 - Roger Stern, Bill Mantlo (Loved every minute of this trip down memory lane.)
Guerillas, Volume 1 - Brahm Revel (Really dug this fascinating look at war.)
Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition, Book Four - Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra (This series gets better and better with each volume. So sad the story is going to end for me soon with the final volume finally solicited.)
Daredevil Omnibus, Volume 1 - Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark, Stefano Gaudiano (Not as good as Miller or Bendis’ runs, but certainly in the top three.)
Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2: War of Kings, Book 1 - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
War of Kings - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning and Various
Nova, Volume 5: War of Kings - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3: War of Kings, Book 2 - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
Torso - Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyke (I love these kinds of stories that are rooted in non-fiction and set in places I’m familiar with.)
Spider-Man: The Gauntlet, Volume 3 - Various
Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of Our Fathers - Reginald Hudlin, Denys Cowan
Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America - Jeph Loeb, Various
The Immortal Iron Fist: Immortal Weapons - Various
Daredevil Omnibus, Volume 2 - Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark, Stefano Gaudiano

T-Shirt Time Machine

2010-12-21T10:35:00.012-05:00

I had to get some stuff out of a box on the top shelf of my closet the other day and accidentally knocked over another box. It damn near hit me on its way to the floor, and when it popped open two things fell out: a pair of t-shirts. T-shirts that are well past their shelf-life. Their designs are either faded or completely gone. They are threadbare and worn, and I can see my hand through the fabric when I hold it up inside the shirt. I’ve hung on to them for purely sentimental reasons. Though from two different eras of my youth, both of them were incredibly important to me in their day.

The first shirt, my John Lennon shirt, was purchased for me by the girl I dated my senior year of high school. She was the one who really pushed my limits creatively and expanded my horizons musically. It was a tragic and doomed relationship from the start, I suppose (as is most everything rooted in adolescence). She was a year older than me and had attended a different high school, but we met at work and it grew from there. The summer after my senior year, she moved to San Francisco to be with her old boyfriend, and I moved into a dorm on the campus of Bowling Green State University with my buddy John. The shirt I wore thin, yet saved, celebrated the release of Imagine. The front image of the shirt is mostly gone, but there are hints of color that was the logo from the John Lennon biopic. The back is completely empty now, with just the ghosts of what was the lengthy movie description: “Discover John…the angry youth, the musician, the radical, the husband, the father, the lover, the idealist…through his own words and personal collection of film and music.” My love for this radical artist mixed with young love for a girl has proved to be a potent combination… one that has me holding on to a t-shirt-turned-rag 21 years later.

While I can pinpoint a specific era that the Imagine shirt was purchased and received, I can tell you the exact place, day, and year I purchased the other shirt. I became a fan of Anne Rice's work after discovering it in high school. A few years later, I was living in Central Florida, where my life was in a bit of upheaval. I was working the graveyard shift at a Disney resort, which allowed me to do some daytime events when the opportunity presented itself. This was the case on November 22, 1993, when White’s of Lake Buena Vista hosted Anne Rice on her book signing tour for Lasher. I stood in line and had my copy of the book signed, along with one of the little postcards she had. I also bought a t-shirt that day… with the cover of the new book on the front and the date and bookstore name in small print under it. I wore the shirt relentlessly (yes, relentlessly), and it was strangely important to me. It was a link between my former life in Ohio, the relative innocence of high school and my punk phase that I associate with discovering Rice’s books, and my reeling then-present life that was slightly off the rails. Seventeen years ago, the t-shirt somehow helped ground me.

(Side note: The Anne Rice book stop in Central Florida was a part of a larger, nationwide tour. I know this because my dear college friend Jen saw her at a Columbus, Ohio, book signing and sent me the postcard Rice had signed for her as a makeshift Christmas card that same year. Which I have also saved for all these years and knew right where to look to find it.)

This inexplicable link to the past, in the form of t-shirts I’ll never wear again, makes no sense to me. But in the end, I still couldn’t bring myself to ditch them. I put the two t-shirts back in the same box they fell from, and put that box back on the top shelf of my closet to be rediscovered at some future date, when I least expect it.

We Eat Ham and Jam and Spam a Lot!

2010-12-13T08:33:00.007-05:00

Monty Python’s Spamalot
09 December 2010: EJ Thomas Hall, Akron, Ohio

Along with our good friends Greg and Karen, Tracy and I are Broadway in Akron subscribers. We still see shows up at Playhouse Square regularly, but we are always happy to have and support theater a little more locally in Akron. It’s a short, four-show season at EJ Thomas Hall on the campus of the University of Akron, but the selection this year is great.

Because of work travel back in October, I missed the first show of the season, A Chorus Line, so Tracy ended up taking her mom as her date with Greg and Karen. This month, however, there was no way I would be missing the show… Monty Python’s Spamalot! Tracy and I had seen the show back in 2006 up at Playhouse Square, and the production has retained every bit of its irreverence and humor.

I know the source material backwards and forwards – it was (and still is) a staple of my everyday lexicon. But I had forgotten much of the musical in the four years since I’d last seen it. Where The Producers (another fine movie and adapted musical) is Mel Brooks’ skewering of Broadway, Spamalot is the Python’s – or, more specifically, Eric Idle’s – take on the Great White Way. Oh, sure. The roots of the movie and the parody of Arthurian legend remains, but make no mistake this musical is poking more fun at the theater than the off-the-street Python fan might be expecting walking into the show blind.

It’s kind of Python-lite. Sure, there’s a little something to offend everyone in there, but it’s designed for mass consumption. And Python has always been an acquired taste, particularly in the States. Act 1’s “Knights of the Round Table” features a monk and a nun in a seductive dance counterbalanced by act 2’s “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway” roast of Jews. But by and large, it plays broad.

New this tour is the insertion of local references into the show based on the city the performance is taking place in. Falling somewhere between your favorite band shouting “Thank you, [insert city name]! Good night!” and Bono referencing a long-gone dive bar the band played in your town 30 years ago, it’s still a nice touch that makes the show unique to each city the tour hits.

I enjoyed Spamalot and the night out with Tracy and friends, but I definitely felt a different sensibility about the production compared with what I remembered feeling last time. Maybe it’s too much of the “Mel Brooks Effect” – the penchant for movie property owners to turn their product into musical theater – that is coloring my response this time around.

Empire Records

2010-12-10T11:34:00.005-05:00

One thing that struck me over and over watching the first brilliant season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire was the music. Not the Brian Jonestown Massacre tune used in the opening title sequence (which is gorgeous and epic in and of itself), but the use of music within the show.

Boardwalk Empire is a fictionalized exploration of prohibition era Atlantic City based on the lives of some of the real people who controlled and affected that world. Music was everywhere in the initial 12 episodes, and it was tied to the period. This brought two thoughts to mind repeatedly throughout the season: First, I know nothing about hot 1920s jazz, vaudeville, and nickelodeons. Second, it was a challenge to get my head around the idea that modern music – rock and roll – simply didn’t exist at the time.

The music of the period is gorgeous, and completely foreign to me. But the up-side to a show like this on a guy like me is that I willingly search and explore. And now I know who Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor were, and am beginning to appreciate their impact on popular culture. Credit HBO for including music credits for each episode on their site, giving the curious a starting point for digging deeper into the musical archeology of the early 20th century.

As engrossing as the show itself is, when the music stepped to the fore (and music is most definitely a character in and of itself in this show!) I often found myself stopping and thinking how amazing it is that rock and roll as I know it was decades away from even beginning to grow. I love music. Modern music. The result of fifty years of evolution and experimentation. And to conceive of a world where that music doesn’t exist is mind-boggling to me.

And these two notions come crashing in on one another when I realize that the music of the speakeasies was the modern music of the era, the pop music of a generation.

The Value of Original Art

2010-12-09T10:10:00.008-05:00

My friend Andy posed this question earlier today:

Should artists sell their original art? Should it be more precious, or it’s just ink and paper, dude?

Andy’s question seems to imply that the act of selling original works devalues its status as art, its “precious”-ness.

I’m sure the reasons artists decide to sell or not to sell their original art is as varied as the artists themselves. Some may feel it’s a personal connection between themselves and the creation, where others may feel it’s simply a job they got paid for. The artist has every right to decide whether or not they sell their original art. Am I disappointed when I discover a favorite artist of mine doesn’t sell his original art? Sure, but I certainly can’t be upset about it. That’s the artist’s prerogative.

On the other end of that transaction, as someone who purchases original art (and has purchased original art from Andy), I would argue that selling it doesn’t inherently negate its value as art. I wouldn’t purchase a piece of original art if it didn’t have value to me – value that warrants me seeking out the art, paying for it, and displaying it.

I may be reading too much into Andy’s question, but I think what he’s truly struggling with is a something only he can answer. And, like much of life, it’s not simply black or white, elevated art or crass commerce. I think Andy's real question to himself is “Can I sell my original art and still feel like both the piece and I still have value beyond the dollar amount attached to it, dude?”

Short Season Shows

2010-12-08T14:29:00.010-05:00

This week we watched the season finales of both HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and AMC’s The Walking Dead. Both were short-season shows – Boardwalk Empire at 12 episodes and The Walking Dead at just six.

There is still a delta between premium cable and basic cable channels. Boardwalk Empire was sweeping and lush. Similar to Deadwood (a show I am admittedly biased about because I consider it the best television show ever produced), Boardwalk Empire takes historical figures and plays with them a bit, providing a fictionalized version of them and their world. Steve Buscemi is genius in his main character role, surrounded by a brilliant cast and held up by an engaging story. Although spread over a dozen episodes, they still wrought tension from every episode… not a clunker in the bunch.

The Walking Dead, from the comic book series by Robert Kirkman, was ambitious from the beginning. To bring a zombie tale to the small screen and do it justice is a challenge. The Walking Dead comic series is one of my all-time favorites (and that of a lot of other comic fans I know). It is incredibly well-written and perfectly presented. Just basing a show on this series was enough to get me to watch.

Tracy enjoyed the first six episodes, and I’ve heard the same from others who have no familiarity with the comics. I am able to divorce myself from the source material (particularly comic books) and just enjoy a television show or movie if well done. They are different animals with different audiences and sensibilities. But it was surprising just how far The Walking Dead show chose to depart from the source. It wasn’t that deviation so much as the general meandering of the story that seemed to detract for me. The first season seemed to shamble along like of the undead walkers the protagonists are trying to avoid. The characters didn’t really develop much outside of some rather broad strokes, but I’m willing to give this another season (perhaps the gutting of the writing staff for the second season will help with things?) and see where it goes.

'Tis the Season

2010-11-22T09:54:00.011-05:00

Pink Martini
18 November 2010: Palace Theatre at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

Driving up to Playhouse Square Thursday night listening to Pink Martini’s Splendor in the Grass album, Tracy said to me, “I wish they would do a Christmas album.”

Walking in to the lobby of the Palace Theatre for our second Pink Martini concert in eight months, Tracy wandered over to the merch table and returned with a copy of the just-released-two-days-earlier Pink Martini holiday CD, Joy to the World.

We knew this show would be different from the Severance Hall concert in March – for starters, this one wouldn’t be with the Cleveland Orchestra, but we expected it would be largely the same – so it was a great surprise to be treated to not only a setlist of their standards, but also ring in the holiday season with some world-spanning Christmas music!

The little orchestra from Portland, Oregon opened with “Bolero”, which seems to have taken its place as their regular set opener these days (and without complaint – I love that song!). And they hit all the high points: “Sympathique”, “Hey Eugene”, “Hang on Little Tomato”, “Amada Mio”, “Donde Estas, Yolanda?”, and “Over the Valley”. Making room for the holiday tunes, “Verionique” was notably absent, and as much as I enjoy the one-two fun of “And Then You’re Gone”/“But Now I’m Back” off last year’s Splendor – and they were fun live earlier this year – I’m glad they excised them from the setlist this time around. As amusing as those two are, I’d hate to see two spots on the setlist taken up by them when there are so many other options in their rich catalog.

(Pink Martini at Pittock Mansion, Photo by Autumn de Wilde)

Joy to the World offered some beautiful holiday color to the program. Lead singer China Forbes transformed and owned both “Shchedryk” (a song Americans know as “Carol of the Bells”) in its original Ukrainian and “Little Drummer Boy”. Bandleader/pianist Thomas Lauderdale and the rest of Pink Martini had a good time with “Auld Lang Syne” and “Congratulations – A Happy New Year Song”.

Lauderdale, serving as ringmaster as much as bandleader, was in a particularly playful mood. He rode bandmate Dan Faehnle relentlessly on his Ohio roots. The former Diana Krall guitarist from Toledo was ribbed and quizzed and embarrassed by Lauderdale in the most playful and good-natured way. And when the band came out for their encore, they opened it with a rag-tag version of “Beautiful Ohio”, the state song.

Like in March, the band came out after the performance and signed autographs and posed for pictures in the lobby of the stately theater. While I maintain that House of Blues was the best venue to enjoy the band, the atmosphere of Playhouse Square suits Pink Martini just fine.

Comics... Yeah!

2010-11-19T11:23:00.016-05:00

If you follow me on Twitter or frequent the PKD Media site, then you probably saw the announcement yesterday that I’m the new writer on Exo-1 and the Rock Solid Steelbots! I am so thrilled to be even a small part of the PKD Media Universe. I have a lot of respect for Shawn Pryor – the mastermind behind PKD, and the creator and original writer of Exo-1 (along with Mercury and the Murd, Agents of C.O.L.T., and the PKD Black Box Podcast) – and what he’s done.

The internet is an amazing thing – especially for a geek niche community like comics. Growing up, the only friend I had who was into comics was Mark. Mark and I are still friends (and comics are still very much a part of our lives – I wrote a book about comics and he teaches a graphic novel course at George Mason University), but now I also have friends all over the world who are into comics thanks to forums and social networking sites. My friendship with Shawn is a perfect example. I met Shawn through Twitter, then in-person at the Pittsburgh Comicon earlier this year. In late spring, mutual friend, comic creator, and con organizer Zack Kruse invited both Shawn and me to be a part of the first Summit City Comic Con in Fort Wayne. It was there at the pre- and post-show parties that Shawn and I really had the opportunity to hang out and talk about writing and comics and all of the things that get us excited about the culture.

I knew I wanted to try my hand at scripting a comic. It seemed like a perfect challenge to step outside of the non-fiction, pop culture-based, and often nostalgia fueled writing I have done up to this point. In getting to know Shawn, I realized he is just such a genuine good guy. He makes comics because he loves them, and that comes through in everything he has done with PKD Media and I’m certain that is what we’ll see from Action Lab Entertainment. The problem is that Shawn never stops working, and he was stretched far too thin. So that perfect storm of our friendship, my desire to push myself creatively, and Shawn’s need to lighten his workload resulted in this opportunity.

I’m having a lot of fun writing these characters and am enjoying the challenges of finding their voices while making sure I stay true to the characters as Shawn intended, along with plotting and orchestrating scenes. I am looking forward to finishing this story and ultimately seeing it realized through Daniel J. Logan’s art. I am forever grateful to Shawn for giving me this chance. I couldn’t be more proud to be associated with Shawn and hope I do justice to these characters and this world he created.

Something in the Air

2010-11-18T12:13:00.002-05:00

I haven’t been able to right my personal creative writing ship that has been listing for months. September was consumed by my freelance writing jobs, and October fell into the oblivion of my day job. Now I find myself halfway through November, and the only groove I’ve found is one of denial.

I have ideas rumbling around in my head, on notepaper floating around my office, and on virtual scraps of Word saved on my laptop, but without motivation to expand on any of them. Unlike almost one year ago to the day, when I laid blame at the feet of Twitter, this year I don’t think it’s about laziness (or Twitter). I think this is about burnout and routine. I don’t know that I could be a full-time freelance writer or write for a living (although much of my day job does involve writing). In preparation for the month of travel I had for work, I wrote non-stop from the moment we got back from our family vacation in mid-August until I left for Jacksonville on that first business trip at the end of September. I cranked out some good stuff too – a freelance piece for ToyFare magazine (although they only published two of the seven articles I submitted to them), a really fun piece on Elektra for a future issue of Back Issue magazine, and my very first comic book script. But all that writing, followed by an intense nearly six weeks of travel, burned me out and pulled me from any semblance of a writing routine.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in my struggles. John blogged about similar creative problems just today. And with similar resolve, it’s time to start putting myself back out here… writing about the things I love and reengaging in the pop culture dialog among my friends and the Interwebs.

Hiatus

2010-09-20T08:01:00.000-04:00

Obviously, the blog’s been dark for a while now. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say so much as work has been pretty all-consuming and any free time available for writing has been going to freelance writing jobs.

If you’re looking for a fix of my writing, check out next month’s issue of ToyFare. I covered the new toy and statue releases and exclusives at Star Wars Celebration V. There was all kinds of goodness from Hasbro and Gentle Giant and Lego to be had! The issue (#160) should hit stands around October 13. Check it out!

I’ve also been working under deadline for Back Issue, writing a piece on Elektra for their “Death” issue. While the copy is due next month, the issue (#48) won’t hit stands until next Spring. Here’s the cover image for the issue, though, to tide you over.

Around that same time next year there will be a comic available written by yours truly. I’m really excited about it and have been having a lot of fun scripting it. I can’t give away any specifics yet, but I’m looking forward to finally being able to share details soon and watching it all come together!

I have some writing project ideas for the blog and elsewhere that I’m excited to jump on – some going back to my music journalism roots, others geek related, and some stuff that’s just plain fun. So if you can hang tight until I get over this hump and we get closer to the holidays, we’ll bring the lights back up on Random Thoughts Escaping and hopefully there’ll be a little something for everyone to enjoy. Thanks for sticking around!

A Central Florida Comics/Star Wars Mash-Up

2010-07-29T07:49:00.000-04:00

I’ve known Todd Merrick for years. We worked together at the old Disney Inn and spent way too many Wednesdays at “Nickle Beer” night at Church Street Station in the ’90s. Todd quickly became one of Tracy’s friends too after she and I began dating, and he ended up in our wedding.

A year or so ago, Todd opened up Heroes Landing, a nice little comic shop in Clermont, Florida. I had a chance to stop in when I was in town on business last month, and was thrilled to find a clean, well-kept store with a little bit of something for everyone. When Todd found out I was coming back in town to cover Star Wars Celebration V for ToyFare magazine, we immediately hatched a plan for me to do an in-store signing for my book, Deus ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic Book Fan, the same week.

Todd has all kinds of pre-convention stuff planned Wednesday, August 11! With me at 3pm will be John Booth signing copies of his book, Collect All 21 (which was edited by yours truly). Christian Slade, Top Shelf Comics author and artist, will be signing copies of his KORGI book series and doing sketches. And Chris Macht, director of The Force Among Us documentary, will be signing copies his DVD, as well.

Later, Arnie and Marjorie from the Star Wars Action News podcast will be hosting a charity trivia event at the store beginning at 7pm. Proceeds from the $10 entry fee will benefit the Leukemia (“Luke”-emia, in this case?) and Lymphoma Society of Central Florida.

So if you’re local to Central Florida or coming in town for the convention, stop in at Heroes Landing for what looks to be a fun, unofficial Celebration V pre-party, and support some creative types in our endeavors!

August 11
Events Begin at 3pm

Heroes Landing
12348 Roper Blvd.
Clermont, Florida 34711
352.242.XMEN
info@heroeslanding.com

Revelations

2010-07-27T08:02:00.000-04:00

Capping off what might have been the kiddo’s best weekend ever, we finally let him watch Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. We have held off on this because it’s PG-13 and can be intense in spots.

Although he doesn’t know it yet, he’s going to Star Wars Celebration V in a few weeks, and Tracy and I thought it was only right that he see all the movies in the franchise before we go. So while Tracy and I were making dinner Sunday night, and we off-handedly asked him if he wanted to watch Episode III, he flipped! I don’t think anything could have made him happier. (But he was also thrilled to learn we were having tilapia, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and a salad for dinner. All on his “favorites” list.)

Tracy and I are not fans of the prequel trilogy. We also understand that it was not created for us. It was made for the kiddo and his generation, so we let them have it. Tracy and I obviously sat through Episode III with him Sunday night, and although we’d seen it at least once before (maybe twice), something was different about this viewing. Sure, it was very cool to watch our son experience a Star Wars movie he has waited years to see, but from our point of view, we were surprised just how powerful the death of Kit Fisto and the execution of Order 66 are when you’ve watched two seasons of the Clone Wars television show.

Over the course of the last two years, we have watched all of the Clone Wars episodes as a family. We look forward to it every week when new episodes are being churned out and have watched the season one DVD set a couple of times through. Because of the series, we have grown to care about the prequel universe characters. And, for the first time in a long time, the characters of the Star Wars universe on the big screen meant something to us.

I should have seen it coming, though, because the first time Hayden Christensen appeared on screen in Episode III during this viewing I was actually taken aback! I knew I was watching the live action movie, but was fully expecting the Clone Wars animated version of Anakin Skywalker anyway. And I think that’s a testament to how well done the series is – I have maintained for a couple of years now that it took the Clone Wars animated movie and subsequent television series to get me to actually care about Anakin.