Pardon my absence ...

I've been busy with a couple things lately, including getting stuff ready for the July 16 launch of Reveille, but I plan to have some new and at least somewhat non-traditional content up here, as well as the return of the Signal Eats Noise media taster, which has been on vacation.

In the meantime, you can look at my unspeakably cute dog, who's now going to be world famous as the Daily Puppy for July 2, 2007. Someday I'll have kids, and maybe I'll be proud then, but this is pretty great until then.

Asst'd non-music related things

1.) The NBA Finals are tremendously disappointing. If you've got ESPN Insider (sorry, them's the breaks), you can check our John Hollinger's excellent idea about how to fix this. I'll give you the basic idea: the playoffs get seeded like normal, but then you have the #8 team in the West play the #1 team in the East, and vice versa. This way, you're far more likely to have the two best teams in the league play each other, rather than the West champ killing the "best" of the East. I can't say for sure this'd work, but usually Hollinger's on his stuff and they have to try something.

2.) I went and saw "Don Juan Giovanni" at Jeune Lune last night. It's a play/opera that combines Moliere's take on the Don Juan myth with Mozart's musical that did the same. And it's real weird. But not rewardingly weird. I found it incredibly flat and unresonant. The music was taken from "Don Giovanni", but it seemed like the words had been changed a bit here and there to fit the story. And then there were definitely elements taken straight from Moliere, as when Don Juan began speaking in French for a long monologue towards the end.

It was all rather muddled--a kind of mashup that expects the audience to be well-versed enough with both Moliere and Mozart to appreciate it, I think. It was sort of like someone making a play featuring the Adam West Batman and the Christian Bale Batman, but not nearly as fun.

See, I think that when you have an archetype like Don Juan, whose story is told over and over by different cultures in different periods, they draw him in such a way as to illuminate something about their own society. Is he a scoundrel whose defiance of societal mores ends in his downfall? Or is he the ultimate romantic, brought low by his own impulses, but still a heroic figure? I think "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is, in essence, a late 20th-century American reading of the Don Juan story. Sexual promiscuity ain't what it used to be these days, so what Bueller does is refuse to live by the rules. He's surrounded by people who want him to conform to a certain standard of behavior and he defies that at every turn and *he gets away with it*. It's a reading that rewards the carpe diem approach to life because hey, that's who we are.

This play didn't really seem to interpret the story in any way. I didn't come away with a sense of what the character was supposed to mean to us, nor even who he really was. In fact, almost none of the characters felt like real people, although Steven Epps' turn as Sganarelle was at least entertaining.

There was also a lot of modern-day slang and commentary thrown into it that didn't seem to connect with the subject because they refused to place the story in any concrete time period. So here we have Sganarelle spouting off about George W. Bush and Iraq, but driving around a beat-up Studebaker and meeting Italians who at first speak no English, and then suddenly fluent English in the second half.

Did I mention yet that Don Juan, played by an older gentleman whose name escapes me at the moment, threatened to pull out a can of whupass at one point? That was probably where it jumped the shark.

Anyways, I was disappointed, because I was really looking forward to my first show at the Jenue Lune Theater. The staging was at least well done, and the aforementioned car was handled really interestingly, set up on tiny wheels that could be turned almost 90 degrees so the car wouldn't drive so much as drift across the stage.

3.) I got nothing music-related. I just finished an article on Moon Maan, which will be out in next week's City Pages, and I'm working on some CD reviews and a Low feature for Skyscraper Magazine. Once that's all done? I dunno. We'll see where we're at.

Veronica Mars cancelled

All right, apparently I'm late to this party, but it's shitty that the CW pulled the plug on Veronica Mars. Apparently, creator Rob Thomas had pitched a possible story jump arc for next season which would leave the rest of Veronica's college career to the imagination, and jump forward to Veronica's first year at the FBI academy. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't go for it.

A shame really, that we're not going to get to see Veronica at the Academy, but I have to say the college thing wasn't going so well. Havrilesky is right: Veronica's better than finding the lost football playbook. When the show was based in high school, it was tapping into the long line of great high school shows like Freaks and Geeks and, to some extent, The Wonder Years. The drama on those shows could be ramped up so high because we forgive teenagers their trespasses into the realm of hysterics because they are, first and foremost, the most solipsistic creatures on the planet. Rob Thomas crafted the stories for the first two years out of a fantastic blend of real world tragedy (Lilly's murder, the bus crash) and social anxiety (Veronica's balancing act at Neptune High's periphery, her everyday problems with relationships), conflating and equating the two in the process, and you believed it. Thomas was very much in touch with the way high schoolers have this sense that everything happens to them, and are never very good at telling the difference between a real disaster and their own problems.

Witness the way Logan stumbled again and again into trouble without ever learning his lesson. When he was a senior in high school, it was almost endearing to the viewers, even as it was alternately threatening and seductive to Veronica. Now that he's in college, though? His puppy dog eyes and inability to man up have worn thin.

And then there's Veronica herself, a character in the model of Jimmy McNulty from the Wire in that she's amazingly good at her job--taking her job as sleuthing, getting revenge and doing it all while looking great--and absolutely abysmal at personal relationships. She keeps being drawn to the bad boys, and even when she isn't--that is, when she was with Duncan or during her current dalliance with Piz--she's clearly ill-suited to them. It's a masterful tone that's been struck in the series: she's a classic perfectionist who's completely out of her element when forced to yield to someone else's needs and desires.

If you haven't yet, you should really check out the series on DVD. Season 1is maybe the better of the two, although Season 2does have a couple of the best episodes, like the one where Wallace and Veronica visit Hearst College.

To make this at least somewhat music-related, I should mention that VM has always done a great job with music. Britt Daniel from Spoon appeared as a cafe customer who sings a karaoke version of "Veronica" by Elvis Costello and they've also championed (albeit slyly) the music of Austin's Cotton Mather, a band that put out one absolutely killer album called Kontikiback in 1997. It's just about the best slice of Beatles-tinged indie psychedlia you could imagine, with Robert Harrison's lyrical world populated by strange characters like Aurora Bori Alice and places like the Church of Wilson. They first popped up in VM at the end of the first season, where their song "Lily Dreams On" played over the last scene, and then they popped up again two weeks ago. Paul Rudd appeared as a quasi-washed up rocker who was still peddling the songs written by his dead bandmate when he came to Hearst College to play a show. Of course, the tapes he used as backing tracks (well, they were CDs, actually) were stolen and Veronica had to find them. When she did, they included a disc labeled "New Crap," and when she put it on, what should come out but a re-recorded version of "My Before and After" by--you got it--Cotton Mather.

Robert Harrison is currently playing with a group called Future Clouds and Radar, and I just got their CD last week. Expect a review soon.

[sigh] I'll miss Vron-vron. Personally, I think it's all the fault of that ridiculous outfit they made Kristen Bell wear for the promos.

Go. Now.

Everyone. Right now. Get up and go see "Children of Men."

I'm still too completely overwhelmed by it to really say anything yet. I'll just say, I didn't listen to music in the car driving home. And that never happens.

That said: Digable Planets' second album, Blowout Comb: still great, and still underrated.

Full (of crap) from a value meal

Has anyone else noticed that every single ad for a value meal from any chain at all touts its giant size in comparison to some kind of eensie-weensie value meal from another restaurant? What restaurant is this? If they all have huge value meals, then who has the little ones? You used to see direct competition between McDonald's and Burger King where they really went at each other, but has the competition become so scattered (among Taco Bell and Subway and all of them) that they're reduced to attacking some kind of made-up chain with overpriced food on their value menu?

Which doesn't even enter into the question of the questionable nutritional value of these value meals. Like it's our inalienable American right to get giant burgers for a dollar that will all end up killing us.

Killing us deliciously, but still.

In music news, I've been listening to Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism recently. A great turn-of-the-year album. That and a bunch of Miles Davis from the Prestige years (the first great quintet with Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, John Coltrane and Red Garland) and this Chess Records compilation called Killer Fretwork, which has some great guitar nuggets by people like Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, and plenty of other lesser known blues performers.

Mythbusters

Did anybody else watch any of the Mythbusters marathon on the Discovery Channel yesterday? What a great show; I had no idea. The idea for having a show in which urban legends and other bits of apocrypha are put to the test scientifically is brilliant enough, but splitting the show between two separate teams (stunt coordinators Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are one team--the more technically daring team--and Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Scottie Chapman make up the other, more J.V. team--they're relegated to tasks like tracking how well Christmas trees respond to different mixtures for food or determining if you can really shoot a hole in a silver dollar with a Colt Peacemaker) is the really genius thing. It keeps you interested the whole time, and from episode to episode, as my fiancee can attest, much to her chagrin.

The highpoint of the episodes I saw yesterday was when they tried to cut a pig carcass in half by snapping a high tension line. They couldn't do it, no matter what gauge of metal wire they used, including some seriously heavy duty stuff. Their conclusion? It might kill you, but you won't be cut in half by a snapping wire, even if it has 40,000 lbs of pressure on it. But then Adam Savage got frustrated with their inability to cut the pig in half, so he looped the heavy gauge wire around Mr. Oinkers, tied the other end to an industrial forklift and hit the gas. Result? "Pork salad," in the words of Hyneman.

The show's pure gold.

no music content here whatsoever

so this has nothing to do with music, but i'm putting up a link to photos i took while i was in sri lanka, mostly as a way of explaining my absence and laxity regarding answering e-mails and posting anything to the blog while i've been away. so, if you like pictures of baby sea turtles and monkeys, i'd check it out.

steve's photos on flickr