The Velocity of Stuff

So, I was watching So I Married an Axe Murderer the other night. This, in and of itself, is not uncommon. It’s a favourite film for me, and definitely my favourite Mike Myers movie. As I was watching it, I was thinking about how great the soundtrack is. I checked the credits, and, sure enough, I had the reason why. Danny Bramson was the music supervisor.

Danny Bramson, in case you’re not aware, is responsible for some truly unforgettable soundtracks. He’s perhaps best known for his work with Cameron Crowe. He worked on every Cameron Crowe movie from Say Anything up to Vanilla Sky. I often think that at least a part of my ambivalence toward Elizabethtown (aside from the fact that it’s just such a relentlessly dark film) is the fact that Danny wasn’t part of the soundtrack. His work on Jerry Maguire was incredible. He didn’t just use album cuts. He had to find the perfect version of a song like The Who’s Magic Bus, and it was the Live At Leeds version he put in. He makes that opening scene work so much more poignantly just by choosing the right song.

The So I Married an Axe Murderer soundtrack is as good as it gets. Both the original version of There She Goes, by The La’s, as well as a great cover by The Boo Radleys. Add to that Ned’s Atomic Dustbin singing the Bay City Rollers’ Saturday Night, and I’m in some sort of Music Nerd Heaven.

As for the movie itself, like I said, it’s my favourite Mike Myers movie. It’s one that I would love hearing more about. I’d love to learn more about the development process, what went on behind the scenes, etc. I always hold out hope for a Special Edition DVD (they released a Special Edition a few years back, but it’s a bare bones release. Just the movie. Not even a trailer so that they could say that there was A special feature), but it’s just not going to happen.

The making of that movie was a very difficult time for Myers. He and a friend did extensive rewriting of the original script, but the WGA arbitration process denied them any credit for doing so. Worse, Myers was making a movie in which he also played his character’s father, in a performance very much based on his real-life dad, not long after his father had passed away, an event from which he had not fully recovered. Between fighting for credit, trying to make the movie a better one, and then, to add insult to injury, having the movie flop, Myers looks at this as being a particularly dark time of his life, and has no interest in revisiting it.

The soundtrack though… it’s a beautiful thing! You can hear it here!

No one knows anything.  It’s a phrase familiar to many who read this blog, as William Goldman’s description of Hollywood.  The thing is, and it’s a sad thing, at that, is that it’s true of most of the world.  People tend to be headline skimmers.  They see the headline, they hear the quick soundbite on CNN, and then act as though they know the whole story.
 
Talk to anyone about politics, and they’ll regurgitate a few talking points, and something they heard in an attack ad, and they think it’s the whole story. You can immediately figure out which party they vote for, because they always vote for the same party.  Rather than pay attention to stances on issues that are important to them, they look at soundbites on the news, or what they saw on the headline of the paper the guy across from them on the subway was reading. They pick sides based on this and this alone, because the other guy can’t possibly have any good ideas, because he’s on the wrong side.  It’s like the tax thing, and I heard somebody talking about this recently.  Nobody wants to pay taxes.  Hey, you look at your paycheque and you see how much comes off.  Nobody likes that.  Then, if you’re a homeowner, you get your quarterly tax bill, and you start looking at what they’re doing at City Hall a lot closer.
 
We had a friend staying with us over the summer, one who works for the federal government.  I mentioned to him that I imagine he’d had a really busy time at work, as they’d been extending the infrastructure spending to the beginning of the fourth quarter.  He was surprised.  What surprised him is the fact that I was aware that the deadline had been extended.  What surprised me is when he said that most people were completely unaware of this.  Not just that the deadline had been extended, or the mammoth amount of work that goes along with that, but the fact that the money was even being used.  He asked how I knew.  I told him, we work hard for that money, and we like to keep an eye on how it’s used.  Not just federally, but also municipally (and, to be fair, I’m probably more scrutinizing of what’s going on at the municipal level, because that’s what feels like the over and above money to me, and perhaps the money on which I can have a more immediate impact).  His answer was that most people don’t.  He’s right, and that’s probably what concerns me most.  Not the fact that he’s right.  He’s a really smart guy, and he’s right about a lot of things.  No, it’s more that about which he was right.  People don’t know.  Moreover, they don’t care.
 
People say that they hate paying taxes.  I can’t say that I’m crazy about it, but the thing is that the same people who say they hate paying taxes sure like driving on those roads.  They like it when they don’t have to take the trash down to the dump themselves.  I mean, who doesn’t hate garbage day, right?  You’ve got to get all the bags and bins together and drag them down to the curb.  imagine if your weekly routine was loading everything into the trunk and lining up at the dump to get rid of it?  Think you hate it when that bag splits down at the bottom of the driveway?  Imagine if it was in your trunk at the time.  Is there a lot of waste at all levels of government?  Absolutely.  This is the reason why we need to be more aware.  We need to be more involved.  We need to pay attention to the things that are important to us.  It’s a responsibility that we have to ourselves.  Everyone says that it’s all about making a better world for your kids and all that, but at the end of the day, you’re always trying to make that world better based on the things that are important to you.
 
And that’s as good a place as any to start.

Memory is a funny thing. All my life, I’ve been blessed with a pretty good memory. In school, I was able to read something once and retain it. In fact, in high school, I didn’t even do that much. If it got mentioned in the class at some point, that was good enough. I remember events in such detail that it once became a game to my friends to see what associations I would make to remember where we were at a certain point. 
The most fun part of it to them, was that I was pretty much always right. Not that they were fact checking. They just wanted to know where the hell we were, and they knew that this would be a fun way to find out. I mean, what are you going to do, look through your old receipts, or ask Rainman what time Wapner is on?  
They say as you get older, your memory gets worse. Sometimes that’s just an unavoidable fact of aging, and the fact that the ol’ CPU just fires up a little differently. I think that another part of it is that there’s just that much more crap bogging your mind down. It’s one thing for me to remember my high school locker combination in my twenties (12-46-23) but holding onto it, along with the phone number we had when I was a little kid (519-271-1392). As more decades pass, there are numbers that continue to accumulate, and at some point you think “I’d like to reclaim some of that disc space, thank you very much!”
 
So today, a guy my wife works with just had a baby, and apparently swiped one of the names that she had been keeping on the short list for the future (not the immediate future. Believe me, when the time comes, I’ll actually write a post). She said I’d met the guy at a work event a few years back. I remember…Nothing.I don’t remember it at all. I vaguely remember the work event, but not meeting this guy. I can tell you where I parked that day, but I don’t specifically remember meeting this guy. It’s tough to meet defeat on something this simple, but there it is. 
 
Now, if he had been trapped in my locker back in high school, I could get him out, no problem!

So, it’s been a week of vacation. Well, that’s what they call it in the payroll office at work. Around here, it’s been a busy time of finishing up some tasks we’ve been holding off on since we moved in back in March.

We started off by digging up some of the side garden. The previous owner had allowed this garden to run rampant, and it had done so, well over the property line. We dug that up and built a retaining wall to keep it under control. We figured that it was going to be a huge job and likely take a couple of days. Instead, we managed to knock it out in one. Then, the hard work started. The garage seemed like a great place to put all of the stuff that we didn’t have a place for, or that we didn’t want to deal with. Now, with the winter feeling ever closer, we realized it’s time. Thus far, and with a couple of days to go, I’ve taken 8 boxes of books to be donated to the local library. I know I’m not going to be reading that novelization of 12 Monkeys anytime soon. Two van loads of junk (much of which was left here by the previous owner) have been taken to the dump. All that, and I’ve still got 2 more days of work to do!

The saving grace though, is that one of us takes Ella somewhere in the morning, so that the other has some time to get work done without interruption (while I’ve been working on the garage, Jan has finished painting the bathroom and has painted our bedroom and the guest room). Today, I took Ella to the Y, which is her favourite place on Earth, it would appear. We had a great morning, and Jan got a ton of work done.

All of that work came to an abrupt end when we realized that Charlie had laid down on a paint can lid. Puppy bath and adult exhaustion ensued.

It’s been a productive vacation, but, it pales next to Vegas last year!

Three months ago, a server upgrade blew up this site.

Now, at long last, it’s not only working again, but I was able to keep all of the original posts! Not a huge deal in this digital age, but I did have the kid’s birth announcement in there, as well as some comments by friends, so I’m glad to have it all intact.

Much has been going on, so I’ll post some news soon. For now, it’s time for Ella’s first soccer game.

Okay, so we managed to get out and vote today, and I was pleasantly surprised by how long the lines were. After that, we got back home for more work around the house, before taking Ella to the park to play on the slides.

Then I got the bright idea to go and pick up fish and chips for dinner. That’s when I remembered what a large Catholic population there is in this city. My secular brain thought it was being all clever, but all of the fish and chips shops in town had line ups out the door, and 45 minute waits.

We had pizza instead. I look at it as a win either way. Tonight there will be games night. I’m leaning toward Tobago, maybe a bit of Pandemic as well.

I haven’t posted anything since Ella’s birthday. I notice that she’d taken her first shaky, tentative steps that day, and now she’s running, and able to climb up and down stairs with great speed. It doesn’t take that long for everything to change. Lots has changed, in fact.

We now live in a new house, well, it’s actually an old house, but we’ve taken many steps to make it feel new. So far, that’s all been on the inside of the house. It’s been too damned cold on the outside, as this winter just hasn’t wanted to let go! The first thing we did was to remove all of the floors. This home, in the 42 years it’s been standing had many floors installed. Unfortunately, none of them were ever removed. Now they have been. There is one layer of flooring through the house, and it’s all new!

There has been much painting, a lot of replacing of fixtures, and removal of several half-assed DIY projects. Having to do so much of hat makes you step up your game as well. Every time the idea of taking a short cut comes to mind, you stop yourself and remember what you just finished tearing out of the place, and you just do the job the right way!

It’s Good Friday today, and we have little planned, outside of some continued tidying of the house (damn, but we have a lot of stuff!) and getting out to vote in advanced polls. I know the election isn’t until May 2nd, but I vote in advanced polls every election. It’s not because I want to miss the crowds, because sadly that’s rarely a problem these days, but rather because once I’ve made my decision on the issues at hand, I want it done. I feel I must listen to all of the discourse before my vote is registered, but honestly, we’re just choosing the lesser of 3 evils this time around, and I won’t feel guilty about ignoring the blather once I’ve done my civic duty.

That’s it for now. More to follow, hopefully before the kid’s next birthday.

Today, my little girl turns 1 year old! I don’t know where the time has gone. She’s grown so much and as though to celebrate her day, she’s started walking for more than just a couple of shaky steps.

Happy Birthday, Ella! I’m very lucky to be your daddy.

With the summer, of course, comes the summer TV season, which becomes a bit more of a season every year. Usually, it’s a dumping ground to run out the contract on some series that the network ended up deciding they didn’t like enough for the regular season, or you get the back half of a coproduction deal, like the Friday Night Lights situation I wrote about last week. Fortunately, as studio executives tend to be somewhat dim, or more to the point, think that all audiences are quite dim (and the success of The Bachelor doesn’t exactly prove them wrong, does it?), we end up with some quality shows. As with the regular season, however, it’s not always the case.

To me, the This-Meets-That pitch is what has generally precipitated the death of creativity in modern popular culture. It’s an executive’s way of saying “give me the same but different”. Of course, what we end up with is a ton of writers, afraid to actually break new ground, stapling two generic clichés together into one, now doubly derivative premise. To be fair, they’re afraid to break new ground because they just want to make the sale. Either way, we end up with a lot of generic TV and movies that have me cursing some putz in an office who sat there saying “It’s Twilight meets Desperate Housewives” or “It’s Grey’s Anatomy in space/walking a cop’s beat/being something other than doctors.” It’s not innovation. It’s lazy.

Think about those two pitches. They both refer to actual series out there. In fact, the second refers to several series over the past couple of years. All these series of which I speak prove my point. The This Meets That pitch is where creativity goes to die.

The first, Twilight meets Desperate Housewives, refers to the new Sunday night series The Gates. A more derivative piece of schlock you’d be hard pressed to find. As with Desperate Housewives, it starts with a big secret. How secret, or indeed how big said secret may be is debatable. It’s set iin a neighborhood with perfectly manicured lawns and a slight over saturation to the colour pallette. First things first: anything with vampires is wholly unoriginal, especially now, with series on every network and every other movie coming out with a “cute” vampire premise. Second, once you have to describe what you’re doing only by comparing it to existing properties, you’ve already lost the originality battle.

TV has been fighting a losing battle for a few years now, between the erosion of ad dollars, PVRs, and the competition of things like video games and the Internet, they’ve become lazy, both on the executive side and on the creative side, as though they’re saying “nobody even cares what we’re creating anymore, so why bother trying?”

It shows.

Before I had any interest in football, I was a fan of Friday Night Lights. The book, the movie, I enjoyed them both. Then the TV series started, and I just wasn’t sure about it. I saw the first episode, and enjoyed that, and I’m not sure why I didn’t really continue watching it, though it started in my pre-PVR days (or, as I like to call them, The Dark Ages), so I’m guessing I missed a couple of episodes and just never really picked up the habit of watching it.

Fortunately, we live in the age of TV on DVD, so after seeing the first episode on a flight, I resolved to get caught up in time for season two. I figured I’d enjoy it.

I was wrong. I loved it!

It’s a mix of great writing, strong characters, beautifully subdued performances, and stunning camera work. Hell, even the opening theme gets me.

I’ve always been a fan of the standard inspirational sports movie. You know the ones I mean. They’re all pretty much the same, and the ones that don’t star Kevin Costner probably star Dennis Quaid. Either way, whether they’re based on a true story or not, the stories are pretty much identical, and they’re absolutely ridden with clichés. Not so in the case of Friday Night Lights. With the possible exception of the Tyra/Landry murder story, there hasn’t been a clunker in the bunch.

The show is run by Jason Katims (Peter Berg, who directed the movie version is also involved), who I recognize primarily as the guy that brought the Roswell books to TV several years ago. He’s also heading up the team on NBC’s Parenthood, another show I love, because, like Friday Night Lights, it’s all about the small moments. I generally loathe things that are remakes. It’s a real problem in popular culture lately, and to me, it shows a startling lack of originality. That’s not the case with either of these shows. They’ve found a voice that is new, and original, even as it lives on the framework of something that came before. A lot of people in Hollywood would do well to learn this lesson.

A couple of years ago NBC cut a deal that allowed the series to continue. It’s possibly the only smart move they’ve made in the last 5 years. It works like this. DirecTV foots a portion of the bill, and in return, they get to air the show first. Once the season is over, NBC starts airing the show.

What ends up happening, for me at least, is that when May hits and the show starts its run on NBC, I’m already kind of out of the habit of watching anything regularly. Truth be told, I don’t watch anything when it actually airs anymore, so those two circumstances conspire to have me realizing, in the middle of June, that I’ve accumulated 6 or 7 episodes. This leads to something I love, which is a Friday Night Lights marathon. That ends up being followed by the pain of having to wait for the last few episodes on a weekly basis, because by then, I’m hooked again.

Tonight was the first part of the marathon, and there’ll be another in a few days, and then the waiting will begin. I know that the show is coming back for a final season. I’ll miss it when it’s gone.