"Some say she's from Mars or one of the seven stars"

I saw The B-52's last Saturday night at their sold out 930 Club concert. They're doing a small tour to promote their first album of new material in 16 years, Funplex. It's actually pretty good. "Juliet of the Spirits" is my favorite and an apt title, since, very early on, the band briefly billed themselves as Fellini's Children. They drew as much sartorial inspiration from the famous Italian director as they did from Southern secondhand culture.


Like many folks my age, I first heard the B-52's nearly two decades ago through their massive commercial breakout single which was completely inescapable in late 1989 and at any subsequent gathering of 10 or more Caucasians, particularly at a wedding. The band, while set for life financially in no small part because of this pervasive song, has subsequently apologized (sincerely, I believe) for its frequent overplaying. Hey, it was legitimately a lot of fun the first, oh, 59 or so times I heard it.

Despite or because of this ubiquitous hit, I explored their early catalog. The summer of 1990 is when I first discovered their still best material - their strange, tacky, and irresistible eponymous debut from 1979. Few albums make me smile as spontaneously and genuinely as this one does. Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson's angelic harmonies take flight without wings, without wheels...

I've been to many, many concerts in different kinds of venues over the years, but nothing I've ever experienced at a show prepared me for the awesomely goofy and, yes, even cathartic power of "Rock Lobster" performed live. (This is the giddy song that John Lennon famously said made him want to make music again.)



They also performed "Private Idaho". (I'm pretty sure my grandmother and an aunt or two, distinguished Dixie ladies, all of them, had wigs just like Kate Pierson is wearing.)



At the concert, it was a thrill to be directly in front of the lovely Ms. Pierson, whom I've crushed on since that same summer 18 years ago. Maybe it actually was a rainy afternoon in 1990 when I first heard Iggy Pop's "Candy"...



It was a little less than a year later when I heard Kate guesting with some fellow Athens, GA residents here.

"Planet Claire" has always been one of my favorite songs. Sci-fi theme music serrated by surf guitar. Genius. Weird and wonderful, it's inspired nerdish grad students to noodle around online when they should be writing comparative papers and wigging out simultaneously.



On the eve of her improbable 60th birthday, right in front of her, I was completely enraptured as she sang sirenlike in otherworldly stage lights. Wow. Thank you, Kate. I'll take you to my leader now...

"My God, it's full of stars...."

Arthur C. Clarke and I share a couple of things in common. We both stayed in the Chelsea Hotel and we both dreamed of other worlds...

RIP

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Not sure how I did this, but, despite the best efforts of Ticketbastard crashing my web browser, I still somehow got a great ticket this past Saturday morning for Radiohead at the Nissan Pavilion on May 11th. (Now the show is sold out.)

I'm in section 101, behind "the Pit", a general admission, SRO mass huddle for the youthfully disaffected. Normally, I'd stand, but, since I'm in my mid-thirties now, I'll take a nearby seat with a great view if it's available. (Plus I can still bang my head up and down during "Planet Telex" or "The Bends", should the guys roar through those now 13 year-old riffs.)

I last saw Radiohead in 2003 on the Hail to the Thief tour. That concert was at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and I was on the lawn. I decided this time to go for broke and get a better seat, which I did. Better still is I didn't remotely go broke - top tier tickets were only $61. Quite reasonable in this day of egregiou$ re$ale$ on $tubhub.com or wherever else people go to get raped by the concert industry.

I definitely want to hear "Fake Plastic Trees" live, since they didn't play it the other time I saw them. Though I've never tried to quantify them, that may be my single favorite song from the 90s:



Or maybe it's just top ten. The point is, if I don't they don't perform it in concert this spring, knives out, Jonny Greenwood. There Will Be Blood!

"Nothin's Gonna Change My World"

Beatles....

In....

Space!

I wonder if Paul is jealous it's one of John's songs that's going across the universe and so he's secretly pleased that this particular composition is being hurled out of our galaxy.

ATU is probably my favorite song off of Let It Be. Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright do notable covers, as well. This video below was directed by former Fiona Apple boyfriend and current Oscar nominee P.T. Anderson:

Coincidentally, Gwen and I just got the two-disc version of Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe" movie out of the library. It could be interesting, I don't know. The Beatles' images and music have saturated pop culture for nearly half a century now and are consequently quite malleable. I'm eager to see what they did. However, I tread with caution as I loathed Taymor's 1999 version Titus Andronicus. My God, is that a pretentiously unwatchable film. It's Shakespeare's most vulgar and vile play, admittedly, but there is such a thing as overdressing a pig, apparently.

Chad Vader: The Complete First Season

I used to really like Star Wars. I used to work in a grocery store. What happens if there's some kind of time rift where both are combined???

Making fun of George Lucas is frankly justified and yet, I'll concede, often can be mean-spirited (I've engaged in my share of the hate over the past nine years). These parodies are not only clever and hilarious but refreshing and reverent in tone. They're accessible to casual folks who enjoyed the movies as well as the hardcore geeks. Lucas is a big fan, and the guy who does Vader, Matt Sloan, actually went on to provide the voice (I guess he was cheaper than James Earl Jones) for LucasArts ' game Empire At War.

Darth Vader had a younger, somewhat less ambitious brother named Chad. This is his story....

Episode I



Episode II



Episode III



Episode IV



Episode V (the infamous holiday special)



Episode VI



Episode VII



Episode VIII (the last one I think)

"We call it Voight-Kampff for short"

Dear Santa,

Thank you for the five disc limited edition suitcase of Blade Runner! I can't wait to check out the nine hours or so of supplemental features. (No, really!) And thank you for In-laws cool enough and genuinely interested enough to sit through all of the special edition DVD of Metropolis with me this past weekend! Seriously, did you build them in your workshop or what? They rock!

Anyway, thanks very much for a memorable holiday. Oh, one last thing. To determine whether you're real or not, I have to ask you a few things. They're just questions, Santa. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. You're in a desert walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden, you look down and see a tortoise...

"Oh, what a world...what a world!"

So Missouri didn't work out last night. And I'm definitely not in Kansas, either.

I'm watching the first part of Sci-Fi Channel's new miniseries Tin Man. It's a fetishized, twisted adaptation of L. Frank Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Pretty much everybody knows the story better from the beloved 1939 movie with Ray Bolger and Rufus Wainwright as the Scarecrow and Dorothy.

There are elements that are almost too clever and cute for their own good in this 2007 version, but I'm enjoying an imaginative interpretation. And how can you not like the adorable Zooey Deschanel in anything? Okay, maybe you can dislike her, but you're frankly just a damn crank if you do.

I used to manage a science museum back in college. We had a planetarium that featured laser light shows. Consequently, I have some genuine affection and admiration for Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I spent many weekends in the early 90s in a projection booth watching rays of red and blue dance through an inevitable rising cloud of pot smoke with that music featured.

Many people know of the Dark Side of the Rainbow, but how many have actually tried it? Well, I did with a few friends ten years ago. We waited for the third roar of the MGM lion, then I started the CD.

Dude...

I recall being somewhat awed when, after her house has been upended and whirled through a tornado to the strains of the appropriately named "Great Gig in the Sky"...



...Dorothy walks out into Oz and the next, most famous track on the album is perfectly sequenced to introduce the color of money:



"Us and Them" is probably my favorite Pink Floyd song of all, so let's go out with that as Dorothy eases on down the road:

It's funny because it's true

Walking Sports Database Scorns Walking Sci-Fi Database

We're all three music geeks to such an extent that we can instantly incapacitate casual, normal fans with no mere mortal minutiae. Still, I thought of one of my favorite Onion articles when I sensed Dave's wordlessly damning Keith's and my mutual enthusiasm for fanboy ephemera (that shall remain unnamed) in a Suncoast store. We were killing time in a Maryland mall across the street from Merriweather Post Pavilion a couple of hours before the Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello concert back in September.

On a somewhat related note, turns out one of my graphic designer colleagues at the Academy used to work for Mego in the seventies. She even painted the heads of the actual prototype 1970s KISS toys that were shipped to China for mass production. "Which guy had the star on his face?" she asked me. "He was my favorite." I think it's pretty cool. I even forwarded her that Mego Museum link and she got in touch with them. They want to interview her for a newsletter and invited her to speak at a convention, I swear. Everybody's a celebrity in somebody's world, I suppose.

MST3K memories

Some of my favorite Thanksgiving memories are the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Turkey Day marathons Comedy Central used to feature in the early 90s, especially. In the fall of 1990 and 1991, on Thanksgiving, my cousins and I would force ourselves away from the television once our families called us to the table. We'd eat, giggling and gorging ourselves, before finally staggering back downstairs to laugh like hyenas for another few hours.

A Rock and Roll Creation

The creative folks promoting Christopher Nolan's upcoming The Dark Knight are having a fun viral marketing campaign for Halloween. The Joker sent out his clowns all over the country on a scavenger hunt. "The Only Sensible Way to Live in this World is Without Rules." The film is out next summer, but the teaser trailer is here.

I was going to dress as Vincent Van Gogh today at work, but, complicated back story, I ended up going as a hippie. Ugh. My colleagues weren't that into it. (One of them I dubbed "The Ghost of Ann Taylor Loft".) There was a creative girl, our new customer service coordinator, who dressed as a zombie prom queen. I admired her pluck (if not her smell).

Tamburlaine last night at the Shakespeare Theater Company was incredible. Avery Brooks, Commander Sisko himself, was a visceral force on stage. Hilariously, the director came on near the end of the second act to inform us that a stage chariot wasn't working. "The noises you're hearing are it stuck in the ceiling," he mealymouthed. Every production now has an obligatory Spinal Tap moment:




Anyway, so we waited until the cast thundered out of a huge door lead by three chained guys on their hands and knees. I thought to myself...why didn't they just do this in the first place? That looks pretty wild.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."

I just learned that the prestigious Uptown Theater here in Washington, DC is featuring the theatrical re-release of arguably the single most influential science fiction film in the past 40 years - Blade Runner.



It famously bombed when it premiered in the summer of 1982, my 11th year on this planet, no doubt because it ran up against this little guy. Ouch.

I saw this film on the big screen back in 1995 at the University of Virginia's college cinema. I think we had the director's cut - the 1992 update without the voice over - but I can't remember for sure. I expect this new release has been upgraded visually and sonically. That's thrilling. Seriously, the fanboy in me in dying. I saw Ridley Scott's other sci-fi masterpiece - Alien - at the Uptown in 2003. The theater was cold because the heat was broken. I recall that genuinely enhanced the chills coming from the screen.

I saw the re-release of Hitchcock's Vertigo at the Uptown back in 1996, shortly after I moved to DC. Very exciting! I've got Elizabethan drama Tuesday night at the Shakespeare theater, Mozart on Thursday, a Library of Congress docent tour Saturday morning, and a Kafka play Saturday afternoon.

This agenda would be hard even for a Nexus-6 replicant, but I'm gonna pull it off!