Friday, December 15, 2006

I miss LP's


The first album I ever owned was "Wings Over America." It was Christmas 1976, and we were spending the holidays in Florida. Fortunately for me (since we didn't have a turntable in our hotel room) the album was huge, with oodles of artwork to look at. Imagine my disappointment as I started my album collection, in finding out that not all of them had three fold-out pages.

For those of you under 30 or so, you've probably never unwrapped an LP. Instead, you started out by wrestling with the cellophane on a CD, and now just buy them digitally. I do too -- I'm listening to my new "One X" CD from Three Days Grace as I write this, having just added the CD to iTunes. Most of my new music today comes from iTunes. It's so bloody convenient.

But it's not the same.

The LP came wrapped in shrink wrap, but not the hard cellophane that encases CDs. Instead, it was a softer, plasticy-feeling sort of thing, that you could cut with a thumbnail. Maybe the softer wrapping was akin to the fragile vinyl disc instead, while today's CD's are tough polycarbonate, encased in hard plastic.

You bought the album at store, like Harmony Hut (it was a mall-based music store in the 70's. It's long gone. Even Wikipedia's never heard of it). In my case, being a country boy, it was a long ride back home before you could play it -- we didn't even have a cassette deck in a car until I was 18, and I only knew one person with a turntable in his car, and he was insane. So instead you'd fiddle with the album while Mom drove back, hoping for liner notes or something cool inside. And the smell... the smell of new vinyl was like magic. Echoes of a musical world that existed somewhere Out There, but now you owned a little of it.

The covers were huge, about a square foot. All kinds of real estate for artwork. Some were bifolds, giving you four feet of canvas, plus the sleeves. Not everyone put effort into the album packaging, but a lot of them did. Boston's "Don't Look Back" seemed so lush and colorful, the perfect match for its dreadfully overproduced sound.

Album etiquette was big. You wouldn't lend your discs to anyone. To a wannabee audiophile like myself, how you stored your albums told me if I should lend them out; people who had five feet of them in a row, the ones on the end leaning on a cinder block, were off the map. Those of us who used an anti-static disc brush on a crackling new album, and who agonized over the counterbalance of our tonearms, we knew better.

CD's were such a revolution. I bought hundreds over the past twenty years, my first being a Beatles CD that I won on a radio show (The Harris Challenge on WCXR 105.9; the question was "What county was Georgetown originally part of?") But even with my then-young eyes, it was very hard to read the tiny type inside. Manufacturers quickly started printing little booklets that fit inside the jewel case, but it still wasn't the same. And is anything uglier than a cracked jewel case? I don't know why it's so bothersome...

But the intangibility of an online purchase is somewhat unsatisfying. I recently purchased a Green Day tune. Clicked "download" and Apple took 99 cents from Visa, and we were done. If my Mac ever crashes I'm not sure what happens to my purchase. I guess I wanted a nice 12" chunk of cardboard to magically come out of the screen...

I still have my 250 or so 12" LP's, even though I don't even own a turntable anymore. Five of my favorites are housed in black picture frames, hanging in my living room. So maybe it was the album art that was the most appealing aspect after all...

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Lazy sod


One of the fun parts about satellite radio is scanning the channels. Some of the stuff I didn't even know was there; besides Squizz and Fred, I rarely wander elsewhere. So I'm checking out conservative talk radio last week, listening to Larry Elder. He says he's got a story about Hollywood polluting LA. Being a film professional, I decide to listen. In short, he introduced the story, quoting verbatim from the text of an NPR report. His only original comments were "hmm!" and "where have I heard this before." No problem so far. Then he procedeed to play the NPR story in its entirety, all 20 minutes or so of it. Again, all of his commentary was pretty useless, consisting of "hmm!" in a faux surprised tone, "really," and "Bob's not happy." I don't think anything consisted of more than five words. I figured at the end, having spent almost half an hour simply replaying someone else's production, he'd have a wrap up. Nope. Before going to commercial, he gave us his synopsis: "Unbelievable." And that was that.

Thing is, he's right: Film productions are ridiculously wasteful. Time being the most expensive commodity in the business, productions do whatever they can to ensure that high-priced actors never have to wait for anything. Food is cooked constantly, generators run all the time, and a slew of production professionals are standing by to supply greens, sets, props, wardrobe or makeup at a moment's notice. The generators really are big towed diesel rigs, which makes sense if you're shooting "Last of the Mohicans" in the mountains of North Carolina, but seems less obvious in downtown DC (the reason is that most of the lights run three-phase power; it eliminates the flicker that can occur if a 60Hz light is captured by a 24fps camera). We should be greener about that aspect.

We also generate a mountain of trash and waste. Most interiors that you see on films are specifically-build sets. When we're done, we fill a dumpster with the stuff. It's cheaper than keeping it for the next project. I could go on and on.

That said, perhaps Larry could have had someone from the film business comment on the study, or (gasp) even done a bit of research himself. Instead, by adding nothing more constructive than "hmm!" for half an hour, he earned a paycheck.

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose...

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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Did someone say, "irony?"

From an old Mallard Fillmore:






by "noted" "cartoonist" Bruce Tinsley. Tinsley loves Ted Kennedy, and has no problem referring to Dubya's desertion from the National Guard as "old news," whilst reminiscing monthly about Ted's mishap in 1969 (a few years before Bush went AWOL, if I'm not mistaken). But, no matter: Tinsley just received his second alcohol-related arrest in four months, this time for driving with a BAC of 0.14.

Irony? Yes. Drunk driver Bruce Tinsley feels qualified to judge other people. Lots of other people.

Bruce's (latest) mug shot, complete with some random-selected strips (courtesty of Cthulhu Is My Copilot):

(Nice-looking fellow, isn't he?)


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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

This is why we hate you, Danny

I've been a Redskins season ticketholder for about 11 years. I've seen the team go from the perennial playoff contender it was in the glory days, to the absolute joke of a team that it is today. I've seen the team go from a personality-rich little gem of a stadium, where the opposition hated to play, to the soulless concrete doughnut that is FedEx field. I've seen the owner go from the spirited but liberal spending Jack Kent Cooke, to the whiny little micromanager that is Dan Snyder.

This week, the Redskins sent me an online survey. "Hey," I thought, "maybe they're trying." I see that you can rank various aspects of the event and staff from a scale of 1-5. Except, of course, the item "Event staff were courteous and efficient." There you can only rank them from a scale of 2-5. I guess telling the event staff that they are not courteous nor efficient is unacceptable. Now Snyder can tally the results and say "See? My staff isn't the worst in the league -- the fans say so!"

I should also note that nowhere is the fan allowed to indicate his or her feelings about the price of the event, from tickets (which went up 21% this year), to food and beverages (it's now $7 for a decent beer) to merchandise (ever wonder why there is so much bootleg NFL gear? Because $32 for a $2.50 tee-shirt is more markup than most fans want to pay) to parking ($25 a car to park almost two miles from the stadium. And if you try to walk? Armed thugs will prevent you from walking onto the stadium grounds).

My understanding is that Snyder likes to be called "Mr. Snyder," something about his small stature. Well Danny Boy, you've outdone yourself this time. I SHOULD rank you dead last for every category, but unlike you, I have some integrity... thanks for the opportunity to sound off about how you've ruined a once-proud franchise.

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