I’ve mentioned before I don’t like to get into politics on this blog. Especially nowadays when whatever you say becomes “fightin’ words” to those who are on the other side.
Having said that (you’ve been warned), there is no way I’d spend any of my limited free time in watching the Republican debates. Based on the high level of crazy talk just about all the candidates have made, there is little point: I will not vote for any of the Republicans. Not in a million years.
Sadly, there was a time not all that long ago when elections came up and I was interested in hearing from each candidate. I would even give them proper consideration.
No longer.
The fact is that the strongest voices of the “right” wing have moved politics so far toward their direction that they’ve dragged almost every other candidate/politician with more moderate views their way. I’ve mentioned this before and it bears repeating: In another time, Bill Clinton and (yes) Barack Obama would be considered moderate Republican politicians ala Dwight D. Eisenhower or Richard Nixon (minus the paranoia).
My great hope is this election finally knocks some sense into the public and the hateful, paranoid, backward politics get rebuked. It happened before in the 1950’s and I’m hoping (praying!) history repeats itself.
Seriously, I absolutely never gamble or pick up lottery tickets. But I’ll be damned if this particular drawing and its enormous jackpot didn’t tempt me enough to give in and give it a try. Not a big try, mind you.
I spent a grand total of $10 on a five chance ticket (ie, you get five sets of numbers on one ticket). I let the computer randomly select the numbers because I have no favorites, not being much of a lottery person.
On the news were people camped out in various establishments spending at times several hundred dollars on tickets. One guy spent every last penny he had on him at the moment, showing off his empty pockets afterwards. I felt bad for him. I hope he hadn’t spend every bit of money he had, period!
Well, I got a grand total of two numbers, one of which was the “Powerball” number -though the numbers were on different lines- and therefore won zilch.
Found this article at Answers.com. I tend to agree with many of the films presented as being pretty strong stuff for a PG, or in some cases PG-13 rating, but the most surprising aspect of this list is how many of the films mentioned were either directed or produced by one Steven Spielberg.
The one that most fascinates me is Jaws. By today’s standards, the gore present in the film may not be that terrible (at least compared to some of the gory films that followed) yet the fact the film was given a PG rating is rather surprising. We had full female nudity (although heavily in shadows, the shark’s first victim) along with some very gory scenes (including a severed leg sinking to the bottom of the sea).
It is rather remarkable the film received a PG rating back in 1975!
Today comes word that actor Alan Rickman died. The name is probably familiar to most people who follow movies and, in particular, the Harry Potter films…
Like many others my age, I first experienced Alan Rickman’s dry, superb acting style with his role as the villainous Hans Gruber in the original Die Hard…
It’s been said that a great action/adventure movie relies not only on a charismatic, rootable hero but also a great villain. The best of the James Bond films featured fearsome villains to match wits with our intrepid hero and in the case of the original Die Hard, Bruce Willis’ Officer John McClaine (a great hero) was more than equally matched with Mr. Rickman’s Hans Gruber. Kudos to the movie’s screenwriters to figure out a way for the villain and hero actually meet within the film. They did so rather smoothly even though the likelihood these two characters would bump into each other seemed really far-fetched.
Mr. Rickman was also hilarious in the Star Trek inspired comedy Galaxy Quest.
You can read more about Mr. Rickman’s passing here…
An observation more than anything else, perhaps one that I’m a little late coming to:
DVDs -and by extension BluRays- are dying.
This morning and for the first time in a very long time I went over to the DVD Drive In website (you can too by clicking this link). I like the website because it examines cult films that are often waaaaay out of the mainstream. Below that link on my bookmarks were links to at least three other DVD/BluRay-centric websites. They feature your more standard upcoming movie fare and I haven’t checked those sites out in forever.
Seeing them made me take stock of the state of the DVD and BluRay and, while I’ve made the observation before (I think…when you post as much as I do you’re bound to repeat yourself now and again), its clear from my lack of interest in those websites that the era of the DVD/BluRay is rapidly coming to an end.
Like the Betamax tapes that were wiped out by VHS tapes which in turn were wiped out (sorta) by Laserdiscs which together were wiped out by DVDs/BluRays, the era of the movie on disc is coming to an end because, once again, technology offers us a better “mousetrap”.
There was a time not so long ago I was rabidly purchasing DVDs and, later, BluRays. The shelves I have filled with films will readily attest to that fact. I also probably mentioned it before, but the other day while in 7/11, I went through their rack of used DVDs/BluRays (In my area they have them, I don’t know if this is a standard thing in 7/11’s throughout the U.S.) and found a used and very reasonably priced copy of the last season of Matt Smith’s Doctor Who.
I bought it for both myself and, moreso, my daughter. She loves Matt Smith’s run of the character. She’s also a senior in High School and no spring chicken. Anyway, when I gave her the DVDs she looked at them, frowned, and said: “What do I do with these?”
Yikes.
Nowadays, if I’m looking to purchase a film (and its extras in many cases), I look them up on VUDU…
Of course, you can do the same through Amazon and iTunes, but I’ve grown to like the VUDU service particularly because they allow you to transfer many of your films from DVD/BluRay to digital with a minimal charge.
Sadly, not all films I’ve bought are available to be transferred and it appears at least some I’ll have to buy yet again if I want to have them on this convenient digital system. Regardless, those cluttered shelves of mine are beginning to get a lot less cluttered as I give movies away.
So add movies to the list of entertainment best available digitally. No more need to buy physical books, no more need to get music CDs (vinyl still lives to purists, of course!), no more need to buy physical copies of video games, and no more need to buy DVDs/BluRays.
The article presented below is not snark. It is not fiction. It actually offers you a genuine, very real, sure-fire way to win this week’s Powerball, which stands at a staggering 1.4 billion dollars.
So, how can this be? What is the secret? Read on, dear friends, as author David Goldman for CNN explains how…
I don’t want to spoil the article (go on, read it!), but I will offer a little hint: It involves spending $584 million dollars. Then again, if you guarantee yourself winning over a billion, its a good investment, no?
That is, unless another person/persons win as well!
Frankly, it was tough getting through yesterday. I feel exhausted because I couldn’t get all that much sleep and of course its all because of the death of David Bowie. I couldn’t help but read the wealth of retrospectives, condolences, and examination of what made him so damn good. It was overwhelming. It was sad. It was well-deserved.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, David Bowie was my all time favorite musician but as good a musician as he was, he was much more than that. He was also a successful movie actor, a shrewd businessman, an artist, and a patron saint to those who felt outside the bounds of “normal” society. He most certainly had his flaws as well, including heavy drug use and, some have said, a cut throat mentality regarding musical collaborators.
Moving beyond all that, to me David Bowie was and is an artistic inspiration.
While other rockers sit back and appear comfortable belting out their past greatest hits to increasingly greying audiences, Mr. Bowie kept working hard and creating new and interesting stuff, the last of which, the album Blackstar, was released a mere two days before his passing.
As I said before, I’m very tired today yet alive and looking forward to another day in which to work on my latest novel. My story isn’t quite done yet and there’s plenty of inspiration to draw from one David Robert Jones.
Waking up this morning, the very last thing I expected to find on the various newsfeeds I look in on was the news that, a mere couple of days after his 69th birthday and the release of Blackstar, his latest album, David Bowie had passed away.
If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time or even casually know me, then you know that David Bowie is my all time favorite musician. I discovered David Bowie’s music back in 1983 and while in High School with the release of his biggest selling album, Let’s Dance. There was something about that music, suave and sexy and danceable yet also mysterious, that immediately gripped me.
So intrigued I was with Let’s Dance that I started looking backwards and buying up his catalog of past albums. To my surprise, there were a great many songs he wrote which I was familiar with but had never put artist and art together. You see, unlike many others I never really got into music -and music purchasing- until I got into David Bowie.
While I was familiar with and loved the works of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and (remember the times!) the Bee Gees, but up until I discovered David Bowie I never really considered music -and albums- as something to purchase and collect.
With David Bowie front and center and his previous albums available, I realized I was familiar with many of his songs but hadn’t connected them with him. The usual popular songs were there, Suffragette City, Lady Stardust, Space Oddity, Changes, Rebel Rebel, The Jean Genie, Young Americans, Heroes, etc. etc. They all popped up on the radio from time to time and it was both a surprise and delight to find the man responsible for Let’s Dance had produced so much other really, really good stuff.
But what turned me from fan to David Bowie fanatic was the discovery of the album The Man Who Sold The World.
You have to put yourself in my shoes back in the mid-1980’s and understand that at that time this album was a rarity and could barely be found in the record stores (this was way before the advent of the internet and MP3 songs). To me, The Man Who Sold The World -album and song- was and is David Bowie’s first true masterpiece and I played the hell out of it back in the day. Even today, I considered the title track my all time favorite David Bowie composition…
And when Nirvana famously covered the song some years later and it had a popularity rebirth (or, one could argue, it was finally getting the recognition it deserved), I couldn’t help but nod and smile.
After the extreme success of Let’s Dance, however, David Bowie appeared artistically lost. The mega-success he achieved (the album and song competed head on with Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I believe the song displaced Beat It from its #1 position for a week or so) left him in a strange state and his follow up album, Tonight, while featuring some very good songs felt like a lesser effort.
He would follow that album up with what many, including Mr. Bowie himself, felt was his very worst album, the ironically titled Never Let Me Down. Again, there were some good songs in the album but the overall work was terribly unsatisfying. Perhaps sensing doldrums, Mr. Bowie moved into other directions, becoming part of a hard rock/heavy metal band Tin Machine for two albums. Once again, there was good material to be found here, but critics were very harsh. When Tin Machine folded, Mr. Bowie returned with Black Tie White Noise, a soulful/jazzy album that received plenty of good reviews but was essentially ignored by the public at large. It was at about this point that whatever magic David Bowie conjured for each new musical release was gone and audiences in general seemed not as interested in him anymore.
Which is really too bad because Mr. Bowie was about to begin the last third of his career in grand style. Starting with 1993’s Buddha of Suburbia, Mr. Bowie found his groove and from that moment on he released one album after another, until Blackstar (his eighth and last album since Buddha) which were all of very high quality.
Sure, some albums were better than others but David Bowie’s later output could never be accused of being half-cocked or indifferent. Unlike Tonight and Never Let Me Down, it appeared Mr. Bowie was trying mightily to release works that lived up to his talent and reputation.
After the release of 2003 album Reality, Mr. Bowie would go on a tour (captured excellently on the 2010 release A Reality Tour CD and Video) and, sadly, it would turn out to be the very last major tour Mr. Bowie would ever do. In June of 2004 and while touring, he experienced what he thought was a pinched nerve in his shoulder. It turned out he had an acutely blocked coronary artery and underwent emergency surgery to repair the blockage.
For ten years after this Mr. Bowie kept a low profile. Many thought him gravely ill. Morbid rumors spread that he didn’t have long to live.
Yet in 2013 and on the date of his 66th birthday, he surprised the world with the release of The Next Day, his first album in 10 years. The album was critically well received and I enjoyed it tremendously, but not nearly as much as the next one.
His last one.
Blackstar, in retrospect, was meant not to be so much another step in Mr. Bowie’s “return” but rather a self-made tribute, one last major work he wanted to gift his audiences before he left the stage. Suddenly the sadness in many of the songs, in particular Lazarus, take on new poignancy.
When Mr. Bowie stopped touring, I suspected he wasn’t doing well. And when a year passed, then another, and then another with no new music, I feared the worst. But when he released The Next Day and looked good on the videos made for the songs, I hoped he had recovered and was about to come back strong.
But when the videos for Blackstar and Lazarus showed up, I couldn’t help but notice Mr. Bowie looked so very old in them and now, with the news of his passing, it sadly makes sense.
I noted in my review of the album Blackstar (you can read it here) that the song Blackstar reminded me of a mix between the early Bowie song Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud and Loving the Alien, perhaps the best song on the album Tonight.
I stand by that statement and further point out that in an interview Mr. Bowie stated he considered Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud to be the first song which pointed in the direction he would eventually go…
In this song, the focus is on the soon to be executed “wild eyed boy”. In Blackstar, we turn our attention from the one who dies to the town itself. I can’t help but feel that Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud and Blackstar, are meant to be bookmarks on the career that David Bowie had, one song circling into the other, with so many beautiful songs in between.
Rest in peace, Mr. Bowie. Words cannot express the amount of joy you’ve given me.
The opening months of 2016 are filling me with nostalgia. Not only did I pre-order and just download the new David Bowie album Blackstar (formally released today, December 8th, the same day as Mr. Bowie’s -gulp!- 69th birthday) but I’ve also pre-ordered the upcoming Anthrax album For All Kings (release date: February 26th) and the Megadeth album Dystopia (release date: January 22). So far, the preview songs released from these later two albums have impressed me and, with regard to Megadeth in particular who I feel had become lost since Mr. Mustaine’s religious right conversion, that’s saying a lot (check out the song The Threat is Real. Whew!)
It’s rare that I want to buy one album in any given two month period of time, but three?
Getting back to David Bowie’s Blackstar, I’m usually hesitant to review an album in full until listening to it a few times. Songs you may not like at first may grow on you while others you like right away may wear out their welcome.
However, before downloading the full Blackstar album, Mr. Bowie pre-released two of its seven songs and I’ve heard them plenty of time. The first release was the song the album was named after, Blackstar…
…a little later came Lazarus, a song which supposedly is about Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien character Mr. Bowie played in the movie The Man Who Fell To Earth…
Having thoroughly vetted both songs, I really, really liked what I heard.
Given the album has 7 songs and I’d listened to two of them as well as a somewhat different version of a third song, Sue (or a Season in Crime), I’ve already heard nearly a third of the album before its official release so I feel more comfortable in giving my thoughts.
Here goes: This is one hell of an album.
The cliche regarding just about every new David Bowie release falls along the line of “his best work since Scary Monsters” or somesuch.
To some degree, I understand the sentiment. After the release of his immensely popular album Let’s Dance way back in 1983, Mr. Bowie hit a bump in the road, creatively. He followed up Let’s Dance with Tonight, an album that had a few good songs but felt like a half-hearted effort. He followed that up with the ironically titled Never Let Me Down, an album that also featured some good songs but, to my ears, appeared to be Mr. Bowie trying a little too hard to create a “hit” record. It’s little wonder Mr. Bowie himself feels this is the worst album he’s created.
After that album, Mr. Bowie tried his hand at hard rock/heavy metal (not as strange a concept as one might think) with Tin Machine. After that fizzled out, he released 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, an album that didn’t do all that much for me.
But what followed was magic.
Starting with 1993’s The Buddha of Suburbia and the absolutely excellent follow-up, 1995s 1. Outside, Mr. Bowie was suddenly on a roll.
Blackstar represents Mr. Bowie’s 8th album since the release of The Buddha of Suburbia and it is breathtaking how invested he appears in this particular work. It’s as if he’s found yet another new crack in the music landscape and is mining it for all its worth. His singing is soulful and the mere seven songs presented are emotional, vibrant, strange (in an oh-so-good-way), experimental (I’ve never heard anything from Mr. Bowie quite like Girl Loves Me, a song that sounds almost like…rap?!), and fulfilling, even more so than the critically acclaimed (and also quite good) previous album The Next Day.
When I was younger and just discovering Mr. Bowie, one of the greatest laments I had was the “what if” question of what might have happened if Mr. Bowie had continued with his Spiders of Mars bandmates, especially guitarist Mick Ronson. Might there have been more albums on par with The Man Who Sold The World or Hunky Dory or Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane?
With the release of Blackstar the answer, which should have been evident before, becomes all the more clear: Because of Mr. Bowie’s nature and his drive to create different types of music, Bowie works best with musicians for a limited amount of time. His best stuff seems to come when he moves on to new musicians, as he transitioned from those early rock albums into the Berlin Trilogy, etc. etc. With Blackstar, Mr. Bowie has a new stable of musicians behind him, known mostly for their work in jazz, and it appears to have reinvigorated and renewed him.
Having said that, the music on this album isn’t so radically different as to not be recognizably David Bowie. In the song Blackstar, it would appear Mr. Bowie, to my ears anyway, has fused his very early work The WIld Eyed Boy From Freecloud…
…with Loving the Alien…
For Sue (or a Season of Crime) I get a distinct 1. Outside vibe, so much so that the song could easily fit on that album.
Regardless of the call outs or similarities, Blackstar is a terrific work from one of the most gifted musicians out there today.
If you’re a fan of David Bowie, buying Blackstar is a no-brainer. If you haven’t listened to any of David Bowie’s recent works, you’d do well to give it a try.
