Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I recently got to see Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile in concert.  I have to say this was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: the improvisational freedom of jazz… combined with the technical range and precision of classical… in the context of Appalachian style and tradition?!  Not exactly three things you’d think would go together.

It’s really quite disarming to actually see what Edgar Myers is doing… and how effortless he makes it look.  I’d heard recordings of this sort of thing before, but they really don’t compare.  I was about 15 rows back and Meyer’s bass was pointed right at me.  There’s just something about the sound that CD’s don’t capture.  And between songs you get to hear all of the banter– it just draws you in and makes you feel like they are performing just for you. 

Thile was so jittery and awkward.  He’s probably one of the greatest musicians in the world and yet he comes off as self-conscious and insecure.  At one point he announced a song and said it was written by “two really famous musicians: Edgar Myer and and Mark O’Connor.”  He emphasized how famous these guys were a couple of times while Meyer just quietly stood back and waited.  “You’re famous, too Chris,” he interjected.

Meyer can say more with a look than these prima-donna types like Bela Fleck and Thile can say in 15 minutes. 

Anyways, I remember Teri Gross interviewing some guy from Radio Head talking about how he’d get so bored at their concerts.  He’d be bored with a set of songs by the time they recorded them… but after they recorded, they needed to promote the album with a tour.  He’d just stand up there and be… totally bored and not into it.

Teri and this Alternative Rock Star had to bask on the sheer coolness of this point for a bit: wow… it’s just so authentic.  What a rip off!  Come on… you’re an entertainer.  Putting on shows is what you do!  And this is the best you can do for your adoring fans?!  I bet it’d stink to be married to this guy.  “Yes dear… I neglected to buy you flowers this Valentines day because I’m simply not particularly inspired by your ravishing good looks at the moment.”  Riiiiight.

But that’s the thing about Meyer and Thile.  They seem to be completely into what they’re doing.  There’s just no doubt in my mind that they are playing exactly the kind of music that they want to play… and playing it the way to want to with the people they want.  It’s great.  They don’t have to make some sort of statement by “being authentic.” 

Something tells me that if you’re putting a lot of effort into “being authentic” then maybe you really aren’t.  But I am going to the show to have an experience.  Maybe Meyer and Thile have cooked up some of the banter before hand.  Maybe they really didn’t want to do the Bach “cover” songs.  If so, then they sure fooled me.  I don’t care either way.

If I take the trouble to go to a concert, then I want to feel like I’m witnessing history.  I want to feel like I’m part of a unique moment in time… and that somehow… it actually is for me.  Meyer and Thile are the only musicians that I can remember ever actually pulling this off so completely.  They are making history… but in an unprecedentedly intimate way.

 Update 3/29/2007: Here’s a blog entry by someone else that was at this concert– and they even have full text of the “you’re famous” banter I mentioned above.

If Joss Whedon gave us the greatest Boba Fett story ever told, then the makers of Galactica have at least climbed up to the level of rehashing tried and true sci-fi moments in the later half of their second season.  They have it all: a crafty foe, a confusing nebula, a heroic sacrifice….  Let’s take a look at the action.

Here the Pegasus takes a beating in a surprise attack.  With the hyper drives disabled, she’ll have to stick around to duke it out:

She pulls herself together and now she’s come about.  “Fire!”

And the Base Star takes a lickin’ in return:

Not bad….  As you can see they do a lot of darkly lit shots really close up– you need explosions to see any details most of the time.  It’s hard to get a feel for the tactical arrangement of the ships.  From the details of this show, the big ships apparently just move into point blank range and unload on each other while fighters buzz around.  It looks like Star Fleet Battles being played by people with absolutly no tactical abilities.  (It remains to be seen whether Galactica will ever deal us an epic space battle to come close to matching the classic duels of the original Star Trek episodes.)

I’d much rather be able to drink in a nice slow long shot of a gracefully arcing vessel.  And so many people have died in this series at this point, the sacrificial death of another flawed leader just doesn’t have much dramatic punch.  (Not like when Spock or that Guy-I’m-Not-Going-To-Mention-In-Case-You-Haven’t-Seen-The-Movie-Yet died.)

The series is doing okay.  Once again I get to a point where I’m not much concerned with what happens next.  The cheap tricks that they use over and over to resolve tough plot impasses get increasingly tiresome: I just don’t get the kind of pay off I’m looking for.  On top of that they’ve sallied forth into the area of suicide bombers, torture, rape, “treasonous” news reporters, stem cell research, abortion, and vote counting.  Traditionally sci-fi has dealt with these types of social issues more metaphorically… and I cringe whenever they trot them out.

The main thing that hurts the series is the overall lack of humor and tact.  Joss Whedon was able to effortlessly give us satisfying stories that forwarded an overall dramatic arc on his Firefly series.  When things took a surprising turn, it always felt inevitable– it did not feel like a cheap serial writer’s hack job.  Also, he could deal with difficult topics while still making you laugh.  Amazing.  The more I see of Battlestar Galactica, the more I appreciate the genius of Joss Whedon.

Wil Wheaton’s now reviewing the first season Next Generation.  (Thanks to GundamPilotSpaz for the info!)  It’s moderately funny stuff in places, but I like it because he really articulates all of the things that stink about the series in a such a loving way.  It’s an impressive feat.  (Also, Wil Wheaton played Car Wars… and was probably designing cars between scenes during the filming of the show.  You’d know this stuff if you’d read Dancing Barefoot.)

It’s somewhat depressing to me how this guy’s career has turned out.  I get the impression that he sorta left Next Generation because he was a hot property at the time… but then ended up going nowhere.  Now he’s married a divorcé, plays poker competitively, and blogs about his geekiness and how great life was when he was a teenager.  According to Wikipedia, his column in Dungeon magazine died, his column for the Onion has stalled, his book sales tanked, and he’s even had to post a huge online apology to his parents after going ballistic on some random topic.

I’d love to see Wil turn things around… but the whole wistful melancholy bit wears thin after a while.  I mean… I’m an aging nostalgic geek blogger… if life sucks for Wil Wheaton, then what’s it gotta be like for me?  I don’t want to think about that!

If you want to see someone that can pull this sort of thing off in a much more positive way… cruise on over to Dave’s Long Box.  This guy is insanely funny.  You have to be careful where you read his stuff because you will bust out laughing.  (I think so much of the guy, I even tried in vain to imitate him a couple of times.  I don’t come close, but I figure I get some leeway if I’m picking on George Lucas.)  I’m glad to hear that he’s going to be posting more regularly again.

Luke wasn’t the only one to get mugged.  It all started when a lone Ice Creature discovered what he thought was a Snack-Warmer.  It sure was hot inside the base, but the Taun Tauns were quite a delicacy:

He evidently went back to his buddies and let slip the news.  Soon, other Ice Creatures began to drop in:

When the Imperial fleet jumped in, a whole party of Monsters were trapped.  The Rebel leaders simply looked the other way when R2-D2 mercillessly taunted them:

These scenes were obviously cut from the film because they so clearly establish a moral equivalency between the Empire and the Rebellion.  It’s sad, really…. 

Well… okay… maybe it had more to do with the fact that these scenes do absolutely nothing to propel Luke, Han, and Leia further into the action.  Even worse, the ice monster sequence that did make it into the film was probably the worst special effect in the entire series.  All you see is this big arm at first.  (Woah!)  Then when he’s coming to eat Luke in the cave, he looks like this stupid unmoving maniquin that’s just being rolled along the passageway.  Barf.

No, but Luke, Han, and Leia are really what its about.  But just sitting back and watching the films again, I have to say that the plot is really lacking something there.  You know… the films really need an epic prelude that undermines the centrality of those three… and that establishes R2-D2 and Chewbacca as being the chief spys and the key movers and shakers of the entire Rebel movement.

No… no….  Nevermind.  That’s a really dumb idea.  Forget I mentioned it.

Ah… the babes of Dragon Magazine.  They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.  Is that a good thing or a bad one…?  You decide!

Check out this Zoar-Cher amalgam straight from the White-bread Dimension:

Didn’t she appear in the live action He-Man movie? 

If TSR got really desperate, though, they’d do the 80’s equivalent of ‘photoshoping’ girl-band rock stars.  For instance, this is obviously a chick from the rhythm section of the Bangles:

Please tell me she has some sort of cloth lining under that chain mail….

Borrowing from popular media of the day is tricky work… the lawyers might make you regret it.  To round out the rest of the magazine, the editors would often take a girl-next-door approach:

Here we get the gymnast from your 7th grade state history class.  Then there’s that quiet girl that always sat up front on the bus:  She was really shy and probably liked horses or something.  Nobody liked her for some reason and you never figured out why.  (If you’d known she was tops with a Cure Light Wounds Spell, I’m sure you would have asked her out.)  Finally there’s the 1/8th Cherokee chick that was heavy into dancing and authentic Indian crafts.  (Don’t call her outfit a “costume” or she’ll correct you: it’s regalia you clod!)

The movie originally opened up with Luke observing the space battle above Tatooine, but the scene was cut because the hat he was wearing was just too embarrassing– even for the man who would later create Jar-Jar Binks!

We also would have gotten to see the “Toshi station” where Luke oh so wanted to go pick up power converters… but that scene was cut because Luke’s nickname was so irritating and also because Lucas later decided that a crystal ball did not fit so well with his vision of the Star Wars ethos: 

I had the Star Wars storybook as a kid and it also contained images of the following scene that hit the cutting room floor.  Man, I thought Biggs was cool.  I could not figure out why they cut him, but then in the nineties Lucas reinserted some of his scenes when he released the altered version of the film.  Oh!  The pain!  If only we lived in a world where Lucas had someone near him to tell him he was out of his mind….

You remember that scene with the shiny black miniature Death Star looking floating droid thing with a syringe?  I never could figure it out as a kid….  I mean here we are in this high tech supernatural universe and Vader can’t pull a Jedi Mind Trick while using some kind of high tech brain imaging.  No… we’ve got a floating death star with a syringe!  It just doesn’t fit.  Well, you should have seen what Lucas originally had in mind: a black droid with a mohawk and an earring!  “I pity the fool that don’t tell me the location of the hidden rebel base!”

He’s another lousy scene that should of stayed on the cutting room floor but that Lucas had to dig back up for his re-envisioning of the film.  At least you get to check out the frightening pre-slug Jabba:

And check out this rendition of the famous Remote and Blast Shield.  This image upset me even as a kinder-gardener with only a dim memory of the movie.  I guess the Marvel Comics artist lacked the necessary stills to pull this one off and had to make it up based mostly on the script?

And here’s the scene where Frodo is entering the Mines of Moria… oh wait… wrong movie.  You remember the scene where Chewbacca gets frightened and Han just randomly shoots his blaster down an empty hall?  It never did make any sense to me.  Apparently, Lucas originally had something different in mind there as we see below.  Hmm… maybe he was running out of special effects $$?

But if I was slightly confused by Han shooting down an empty hallway, I was quite perturbed by Obiwan Kenobi’s light-saber duel.  He just gives up!  He holds his light-saber straight up and lets Vader kill him.  Right.  (Luke, did Ben forget to tell you that not only do Jedi Knights venerate lying, but they are also heavy into ritual suicide.)  The comic book adaption of that fight is much better; Kenobi talks a little more smack and appears to go down fighting.  Here’s line that got cut from the film that puts one of Ben’s more cryptic remarks in context:

Here’s a particular juicy bit… in the earliest cuts of the film, Luke’s father was well known and well thought of.  Personally, I’d like to live in a universe where Ben’s not a liar, Luke didn’t kiss his sister, and where Vader was not Luke’s daddy.  This scene provides some evidence for those that think that things really were intended to be that way as the first film came together:

Here’s a scene that demonstrates how Lucas’s revisionism truly knows no bounds.  You can tell this is the revised adaption from 2006 because Lucas had Dark Horse comics remove the part where Luke screams “Carrie!!!”  instead he makes them put in some lame line about ‘Technicos.’  Right.  You’re not fooling anyone, George.  It’s bad enough that you’ve altered the movies, but could you at least stay out of the comic adaption and leave things be?