Culture

The Brattle Theatre Watch-A-Thon (original) is pretty tempting. I could see a lot of movies between November 11th and December 4th. HEY. YOU. Would you sponsor me?

Not that I’ve got a bootleg copy of Good vs. Evil or anything, but if I did it’d be medium quality video recorded from the Sci-Fi Channel (original) with the Sci-Fi logo in the upper right hand corner and all. But it’d be the whole schmear on three DVDs, both the first season on USA and the second season on Sci-Fi. So it’d be totally worth it. There might be an email address — dvd@timlarock.com — on the amateurish menu screen. Or this might all be a complex sting operation on my part. I dunno.

NBC bought the new Sorkin show. They paid a hunka hunka burning money, it’s a show about a live comedy show (c.f. SNL), and that’s most of the informational content of the article I just linked to. Anticipatory.

Versions of “Shoot Out The Lights” in my music library: The original, off Shoot Out The Lights, one of the best albums ever. Linda Thompson provides backup vocals. They were months from divorcing at this point, and you can tell; Shoot Out The Lights is also one of the most voyeuristic albums ever. An acoustic version, from A Rare Thing. This album is a bootleg from the 1994 tour (August 13th, 1994, in Chapel Hill); middling quality, but good music. This is the only acoustic version I have, although I have a number of acoustic Richard Thompson albums. It’s not really an acoustic song. Then again, that’s what makes this version interesting. ...

Suck news of the day: the Brattle Theater is in trouble (original). Compared to Katrina? This is a pretty trivial deal. But it’s still significant enough for me to care. The Brattle has film programming as good as anything I’ve seen anywhere, including the Castro Theater out in San Francisco. Ned Hinkle, who does the programming, has an exhaustive knowledge of film and he has the contacts and know-how necessary to program festivals ranging from a complete Wong Kar Wai retrospective to a classic film noir series. They also run the Boston Fantastic Film Festival, which is small potatoes compared to Fantasia or Sitges, but which does not in the least suck to have around. ...

The answer to the question “how does filmed entertainment reach the eyes of the viewer” continues to change, as per this article on direct to video movies. This isn’t anything new, of course; Disney has been doing this for years and years. Just ask any parent. Still and all, it’s significant that the direct to video market in the US is gaining… aha. Legitimacy is the word. Direct to video Disney releases is one thing; a direct to video sequel to Carlito’s Way is more interesting. ...

The Complete New Yorker is pretty cool. Kind of easy to describe, too: it’s every single New Yorker scanned and archived on 8 DVDs. You can get a tour of the interface here (original). Yep, I bought it more or less instantly. Come on — $65 on Amazon (or Barnes and Noble)? Sure thing. It’s cool. The interface is a tad clunky on the Mac, but it’s easy to flip through an issue and it’s very very readable. The search is slowish. I’m not sure how well it’s indexed; a search on Red Sox for the last five years or so returned nothing. On the other hand, a search on Cronenberg was quite successful. I imagine each article is tagged with key words. ...

I should be checking the eTree live music archive (original) more often. Cowboy Junkies, 94 shows. Drive-By Truckers, 138 shows. Hayseed Dixie, 13. Mike Doughty, 42. Three Decemberists shows. Warren Zevon, 53 shows. Mmm, tasty.

For my birthday, I got the amazing Kino Buster Keaton boxed set. 11 DVDs, 11 movies, 20 short features, and a ton of archival material. Much of yesterday was spent in front of the television basking in it. And lemme tell you, Keaton was one ironic fellow. The Playhouse has him playing every single role in a stage company, plus the audience, with as many as nine Keatons on screen at once. Being Buster Keaton, indeed.

The ways in which this is not perfect are very few, very few indeed. P’raps my favorite thing is the comment back in the original post. “When I was really into Buffy I remember thinking everything in The Waste Land secretly applied — it’s good to know it can shift fandoms so well.” “Well, I was thinking that, more to the point, the poem doesn’t apply — the essence of the parody is in mapping possibly the most influential poem of the 20th century, with its World War themes and excessive literary references and multiple phrases in foreign languages, onto a children’s book series written by a woman who can’t even conjugate her pseudo-Latin…” ...