Creaky Franchises, Take 2

Just before the summer got underway, the George Lucas Empire announced that due to public outcry it would condescend to releasing the original (as opposed to the digitally fiddled-with) Star Wars movies. Here was our chance "to see the pioneering, if dated, motion control model work!" -- the actual words from the Lucasfilm press release.

Gee, is it me, or does the punch taste funny?

Despite my hallowed estimation of this film, I haven't bothered to reach for my credit card. Original or remake, the truth is, I don't really care. I've seen the messed-with versions a couple of times. Some of the changes are, I have to admit, improvements (the dogfight over the Death Star now has narrative sequencing that doesn't rely on the audience's instinctual "filling in"); some of it is egregious (I belong to the "Han shoots first" camp); most of it is banal. Whatever. Over the years I've seen both "versions" so many times, it no longer matters which one is playing.

Now this, on the other hand, is exciting news! The original Lego Star Wars game had more excitement, more surprises, more thrills, more humour and more emotional content than the movies it was based on. Graphically speaking, it represented the best that a video game can be by coming up with a wholly unique aesthetic (everything is Lego!) and not trying to ape "reality". Its playability walked a fine line between being a quick study, while still representing enough of a challenge to retain interest. This was one of those rare games I played from beginning to end, figuring out all the puzzles and seeking out all the surprises and bonuses (something I don't usually have patience for). It's been a year, and the girls are still playing the game.

So, yes, once again I've dropped plastic for Lucas. I'm looking forward to features like swapping heads with bodies, building my own landspeeder, etc. Typical Lego stuff, in other words, the nature of which gets me wondering: why doesn't Lucas just make Star Wars public domain? In the case of the movies, this might allow a guy like me the choice to keep the tidied-up dogfight, but switch back to Han shoots first.

And why stop there? Why not make up your own aliens, or swap heads and bodies? Why not (gasp!) mess with the storyline? We might finally get a Star Wars product that does better than trade on creaky nostalgia, something that generates actual interest and excitement. Something, in other words, that recaptures the spirit of the original.




Other gaming news: WIRED has an uncharacteristically dire piece on Playstation 3 and the future of Sony, here.

Canada & The Literature of Landscape

If you're a Canadian, it's almost certain you've committed yourself to a long-distance relationship at some point in your life. You can't be a Canadian and escape this fate, because you can't be a Canadian and escape the fact of its enormous distances. In my Winnipeg high school, I had a friend who fell hard for a girl in Thompson. Two cities in the same province, connected by a single, uninterrupted highway – pretty straightforward, right? Now go to Google Maps and take a look at what they encountered whenever they got itchy for a little face-time.

I once fiddled with a short story about a guy from Toronto in love with a girl from Calgary. They squeeze sugar from the phone for a couple of months, until he can't take it anymore. He quits his job and climbs into the car, but not before one final phone call to his sweetheart. He begs her to put on exactly the same outfit she was wearing the last time they were together; he'll do likewise, in an effort to meet at the common ground of shared memory.

So he drives through the Canadian Shield, and the Prairie Grasslands, and finally into the Alberta Foothills, thinking all the time of this woman, her complexities, her beauty, her foibles, the conversations that connected and the ones that didn't. When he finally arrives in Calagary, she opens the apartment door, dressed in the agreed-upon outfit. But she's had a hair-cut, and that's change enough to puncture his fantasy life and end the relationship.

Distance accounts for just about everything in Canada. And that is the chief reason why I can't wait to tuck into Noah Richler's This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas Of Canada. I caught precious few snippets of the CBC radio series that laid the groundwork for the book (and until I can claim it in my taxes, I can't quite justify the $$ for the CDs, available here (scroll down to A Literary Atlas Of Canada ($100 for all 10 shows))), but what I heard was immediately engaging, entirely entertaining and filled with worthy insights. There hasn't been an honest attempt at coming to terms with the scattershot CanLit scene, or The National Consciousness(es), since the tweed-and-patchouli days of Frye & Atwood. Those days are long gone, and if the early reviews are correct this effort by fils Richler is more than a rip-off "update". It has legs and intelligence, and it couldn't come at a better time.

Do The Duties of Fall Include Blogging?

The girls are back in school. For the next week or so, their sleep-time will be marked by passionate but inarticulate chatter, and (in the case of the youngest) grinding teeth. I'm not sure what marks my sleep-time; my wife couldn't tell you, either, because I fall asleep last and wake up first.

I've been mulling over several possible topics, including commentary on two DVDs: Metal: A Headbanger's Journey and Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music. Both were provocative, amusing and unsettling documentaries looking at what sort of purposes extreme music serves. There's plenty to comment on, but at this moment I find I don't much care to. In fact, I think I got turned off.

For both movies, the subject quickly gains theological import. But instead of training the camera on a bunch of pious propeller-heads with vandyke beards who jump at the chance to pontificate at length, we're subjected to a bunch of pierced, tattooed and edgily-coiffed personalities who jump at the chance to pontificate at length. I know that's what I paid for, but the overall effect gets to be pretty dreary, particularly when said pontificators have difficulty mustering up a sense of humour. I'd say of the two, Why Should The Devil is more amusing -- both intentionally, and otherwise. Why's material also opens itself up to some genuine surprises, while the world of Metal is quite predictable (nice to see, though, that Ronnie James Dio has a penchant for collecting cute ceramic froggies). Perhaps if Metal's Sam Dunn is up for another round with the material, he might consider contrasting Wacken with Cornerstone, and his reactions to the two. That would certainly be of anthropological interest, I would think.

But, whatever. Back to the tasks of fall. Canning tomatoes. Draining, cleaning and putting away the pool. Sealing the house against winter-dazed flies and bees. Killing the hamsters.

That's right: killing the hamsters. The girls' dwarf hamsters have passed the two-year mark, and they are in sad, sad shape. Neither of them runs on the wheel anymore. One of them has probably suffered a stroke: it is verifiably blind, and can't seem to use the left side of its body. Combine this with the fact that it's been months since either of my daughters has played with the little blighters, and I think we're dealing with some genuinely miserable creatures. Time for humanity to assert some control over its lesser charges.

And so it is with heavy heart that I leave my computer and head for the back yard, where the end for these creatures awaits...

Choosing One's Seal

Tsk - DV lured me to this site, and now I can't decide which seal I like best - Sub-Genius:



Not "whisky", but still:



Of course, there's always Star Trek:

Ed Benedict, 1912-2006

"It's amazing to me that a guy with such a crusty exterior can make drawings this cute!" - John Kricfalusi



Hanna Barbera Flintstones stylist Ed Benedict passed away August 28, and Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi gives him a sweet and very touching send-off, here. (H/T: Drawn!)

"Me code pretty one day."

(With apologies to David Sedaris and my brother.)

Word-processing software came into its own just as I was figuring out how to construct an undergraduate essay (or a short story, for that matter). I can clearly recall the night my friend and his fancy-pants PC introduced me to WordStar 2.0. Kids these days, with their text-messaging and the Google and whatnot, have no idea what was required for undergraduate essay writing a mere (*cough*) 20 years ago.

First, there was the research: shlepping to the library and digging out the half-dozen available books on your subject matter, the contents of which your prof had no doubt committed to memory. There followed notes, and an outline (I'm sure the kids and I are on the same page, here – right?). When that was done, you wrote out your entire essay by hand. Once you had a suitably impressive sheaf of scrawled paper (scarred with pen-strokes, blots and revisions), you breathed a quick prayer that you'd met the word-count. Then you brewed up a fresh pot of coffee, unpacked the half-tonne "portable typewriter" your father used for his thesis, and got to work. Typing. Carefully. Retracing your steps and whiting out your errors, one freakin' letter at a time. Then typing over that, taking a deep breath, and proceeding with the rest of the paper in the absurd hope this never happened again. And that was just for the little mistakes. If you somehow missed a significant, last-minute revision (not an uncommon occurrence for me), you had to discard all the pages affected by the omitted text, and re-start from where you'd screwed up.

Now here was WordStar. With a feature called Spell-Check (sure, it was American english – but still). "Also," said my friend, "you can erase entire words just by hitting Control/Backspace, or Control/Delete." Entire words! "Or blocks of text, by highlighting, then hitting Delete." Blocks of text!! "There's also a cut-and-paste option..."

You've seen those kids who show up and play with your kids, then when it's time to go home, they don't want to leave your house without their favourite toy? Well...

I was still living at home, and attending the local university. My father had expressed interest in getting a home computer, so he and I hit the road and inspected one fly-by-night-PC-clone-outfit after another, until we were satisfied that Outfit X was the one for our purposes. He signed the cheque for it, we brought it home and I set it up.

The idea was, of course, that I would teach him how to use it. This was very much pre-Windows – the day of the DOS-line. Using the word-processor to type was no problem, but command lines were another matter. I can't remember just what we were trying to get the printer to do, but the image that sticks in my head is of my frustrated father, standing over the printer and pressing the "print" button, applying an ever-increasing amount of pressure on that one crummy button with every failed operation.

That image stays top-of-mind whenever I call my brother to bail me out of some mess I've made with Linux. So long as he's chuckling to himself after hanging up the phone, I'm sure I'm safe. But this leads me to...

Whisky Prajer: Corporate Shill

After some tweaking, I'm back on eMusic. From first-hand experience, I can confidently say to Linux users everywhere that the eMusic tar.gz patch is crap. Months ago – the salad days, when eMusic was offering 50 free downloads to new members – I screwed up every last free download figuring out how (not) to use it. So do not waste your time with it, go here instead and install this Java-based application. (But really: if you're a Linux user and you've come here for my expertise ... well, that's pretty sad.)

I still have extreme reservations about installing third-party software, so let's call this a “trial marriage”. All the same, eMusic's selection is keeping me on their side of the threshold. To name just a few examples of artists whose CDs are typically a costly affair (at least for Canuckle-heads like myself): Townes Van Zandt, Josh Ritter, Steve Forbert, The Drive-By Truckers, Joe Henry, Peter Case, Stacey Earle, Pierce Pettis, Kate Campbell, John Hiatt, The Be Good Tanyas, The Waiffs, Neko Case, (Stacey's lesser-known older brother) Steve Earle, The Legendary Shack-Shakers, Reverend Horton Heat, The Cramps, Moxy Fruvous .... (get me a paper bag, I'm hyperventilating!)

There's also some early Medeski, Martin & Wood (including this incredible song, from Friday Afternoon In The Universe) and a heap of jazz to be had (though I have to admit, I'm still a hold-out for the CD when it comes to jazz or classical – MP3 sound compression does not serve these genres well. I should also mention, eMusic's "Metal" selection leaves a lot to be desired (but perhaps that's just because metalheads are used to getting their music for free)).

Finally, they stock two artists whose work I promote out of a sense of mission: my man, Jason Ringenberg (whom I've written about here and here; it'd sure be nice to see the entire Scorchers' back catalogue made available, but that's beyond his control so I'm not holding my breath), and Mark Heard, whose Mosaics I somehow missed the first time around (more on that later, I suspect, considering my earlier recollection, here).

In the meantime, perhaps my brother has some thoughts re: Linux and the MP3 market?