Wednesday, June 18, 2008
A personal journey with Martin Scorsese through American movies DVD
In this documentary Martin Scorsese takes us on a winding personal history of film. Showing what inspired, entertained, entranced and formed his mind as a film maker and a film watcher. One of the great pleasures of a documentary of this nature is that it exposes the viewer to films that have been not forgotten, but are not part of the cannon of classics…. And it reminds the viewer that not all film that captures your imagination is necessarily great, or even good. Over all I recommend this to anyone who is interested in film, film history, or exploring something other than what ever had been at the Cineplex in the last six months.
The complete DVD history of U.S. wars. Volume 1, 1700-1790
This video, while it did provide the facts, was everything that a cut rate hack job education film strip was 30 years ago. It never seemed to flesh out any of the facts, it relayed way too much on murky reenactment film, clips of movies (none of which were ever credited), and was completely lack in any kind of depth. I am sure there area dozen or more history channel specials that cover all of this information in greater depth and with more style and consistency.
Buckcherry... yes that's right
Back buring Buckcherry’s 15 fleeting fame in the late 1990’s (is that when it was??) we, being the Hi Energy Rock and Roll freaks, used to say… No Chuck Berry, not buckcherry!.. there was a brief flurry of accolades about how they were bringing back rock and roll, and how they were the new GnR, and all of that stuff. Mean while there was a small underground of us who were into; Gluecifer, Turbonegro, The Hellacopters, The Flaming Sideburns, Electric Frankenstien, Zeke, The Supersuckers, and a whole bunch of other bands that were playing the same type of Hi Energy rock as Buckcherry (see the whole of the A Fistful of Rock comps for that story).
Buckcherry seemed like the record industry stab at that underground, putting out their version of the that type of music, and for a moment it was on the MTV, it was on the Clear Channel, and it was in the Magazines… and I have to admit I thought it was shite. Really, why these guys? Why not any of the bands I just mentioned? Why not The Wildhearts? Why not Mother Love Bone… that’s right Andrew Wood is dead…. Anyway, it was a joke to my little world of rockfiends.
Cut to 2008, a band that had been pretty much written off and forgotten ends up on the cover of Billbored Magazine and I read this article about how they lost their record deal, how they signed to a little indie and made good on their promise of keeping on keeping on. After selling several thousand copies of their album 15 (I’ll let you figure out what the title means) they were picked up by a major and have steadily been selling.
Now, I am a little older and wiser, and I know that before I pass judgment on something I should at least give it a listen. I learned this from the white stripes, whose first two records I listened to twice, and was mind numbingly bored out of my skull by… twice…. But at least I listened to them… So I figured that I would give this new Buckcherry a shot.
Not being a rich man, I simply checked it out of the local library… after almost two months of having it on hold, I finally got it last night. I haven’t listened to it all the way through yet, only the single Crazy Bitch and some other tune that I don’t even recall the name of have been injected into my ears… but I promise that I am going to give it a couple of spins and see where it lands. Sure I wish that it was one of those other bands that were getting the shot (the Trashbrats or a end of the line shot for Adam West or The Hellacopters would be so nice) but I am hoping that maybe their current resurrection will help people find some of the others that I have mentioned, and the hundreds of others I haven’t…. nutrajet, The Bellrays, ect.
Buckcherry seemed like the record industry stab at that underground, putting out their version of the that type of music, and for a moment it was on the MTV, it was on the Clear Channel, and it was in the Magazines… and I have to admit I thought it was shite. Really, why these guys? Why not any of the bands I just mentioned? Why not The Wildhearts? Why not Mother Love Bone… that’s right Andrew Wood is dead…. Anyway, it was a joke to my little world of rockfiends.
Cut to 2008, a band that had been pretty much written off and forgotten ends up on the cover of Billbored Magazine and I read this article about how they lost their record deal, how they signed to a little indie and made good on their promise of keeping on keeping on. After selling several thousand copies of their album 15 (I’ll let you figure out what the title means) they were picked up by a major and have steadily been selling.
Now, I am a little older and wiser, and I know that before I pass judgment on something I should at least give it a listen. I learned this from the white stripes, whose first two records I listened to twice, and was mind numbingly bored out of my skull by… twice…. But at least I listened to them… So I figured that I would give this new Buckcherry a shot.
Not being a rich man, I simply checked it out of the local library… after almost two months of having it on hold, I finally got it last night. I haven’t listened to it all the way through yet, only the single Crazy Bitch and some other tune that I don’t even recall the name of have been injected into my ears… but I promise that I am going to give it a couple of spins and see where it lands. Sure I wish that it was one of those other bands that were getting the shot (the Trashbrats or a end of the line shot for Adam West or The Hellacopters would be so nice) but I am hoping that maybe their current resurrection will help people find some of the others that I have mentioned, and the hundreds of others I haven’t…. nutrajet, The Bellrays, ect.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Still Restless...
Guilt and a bit of restlessness has sent me back to this blog... I have found myself writing all kinds of stuff for a bunch of different places on the net. Of course there is my mog (www.mog.com/iren) page, but also I have been writing reviews for the Ann Arbor District Library website, and have started an Sheldari thing as well (http://www.shelfari.com/) so I figure that I should start trying to keep everything posted on this blog in addition to all the other places, or at least that's my intention.... so I am going to try and up date this with what ever I am writing for other sites.....
and then there is the fact that I am going to try and seriously take a stab at writing and getting published. This is something that I have always toyed with, dreamed about, and been interested in. It's finally time to stop planning, to stop thinking and start doing. I feel that I have been pretty lackluster with most of the things that I have attempted to do with my life. My career has stalled several times, my personal life never seems to get off the ground and I have resigned myself to not having to worry about any of that stuff any more and to put my extra energy into writing...
Writing what you ask... my goals right now are pretty modest... I want to write a volume for the 33 1/3 series of books (check out there blog at http://33third.blogspot.com/ .... and I would like to have a book published as part of the Hard Case Crime Series (http://www.hardcasecrime.com/)... I hope to use this blog to keep track of the progress of several of these projects, and to help keep me working on them.
more to come...
and then there is the fact that I am going to try and seriously take a stab at writing and getting published. This is something that I have always toyed with, dreamed about, and been interested in. It's finally time to stop planning, to stop thinking and start doing. I feel that I have been pretty lackluster with most of the things that I have attempted to do with my life. My career has stalled several times, my personal life never seems to get off the ground and I have resigned myself to not having to worry about any of that stuff any more and to put my extra energy into writing...
Writing what you ask... my goals right now are pretty modest... I want to write a volume for the 33 1/3 series of books (check out there blog at http://33third.blogspot.com/ .... and I would like to have a book published as part of the Hard Case Crime Series (http://www.hardcasecrime.com/)... I hope to use this blog to keep track of the progress of several of these projects, and to help keep me working on them.
more to come...
Sunday, April 27, 2008
No Time
Ok... It's been a while since my past post, and that is tied to my lack of time and energy, working full time and my other commitments... so I am going to just idle this blog for the time being....
thanks for reading,
Eric
irenzero@yahoo.com
thanks for reading,
Eric
irenzero@yahoo.com
Sunday, April 13, 2008
It's Ann Arbor...
I didn't live my whole life in Ann Arbor Michigan, but I consider myself a townie. I did spend all of my childhood that I can recall in this town, I went it's schools, it's churches, and it's....wait... that's something else. Anyway, if I am going to shift my focus on this blog to the It's Ann Arbor, I feel like I should give some background.
To start with, Ann Arbor is a vocally liberal, secretly not-liberal, college town located in Michigan. One thing that you need to know about Michigan... pretty much we are a bunch of hicks. I won't go into that yet, but it's true. So Ann Arbor is a town that is filled with a couple of types of people, and it's these people that I will be ranting about here... and make no mistakes this will be mostly ranting.
The whole idea for this shift in focus comes from my talking to people since I have returned to the area. I have found myself working with a lot of people who are not Ann Arborites (and that is the prefered nomiclature) and started to pick up on the fact that they see Ann Arborites in a special way... As a townie I started to wonder about the things that I was hearing and seeing. A lot of them I already knew about, many of them were things that I had been seeing since High School... mostly the Hippy-ocarcy of this place.
I am going to stop and define that for you for a moment. A hippy-crit is someone that has a save the earth bumper sticker on their car, but has to use the gas powered mower every weekend to keep the grass short, and in the old days had Chem Lawn come out every other week and make the grass greener than green... that's it in a nut shell.
Other things that I have noted as of late is that there are a lot more of the Ann Arbor Crazies, and of the Angry White Men in their 50's in this town than I had remembered.....
more later.
To start with, Ann Arbor is a vocally liberal, secretly not-liberal, college town located in Michigan. One thing that you need to know about Michigan... pretty much we are a bunch of hicks. I won't go into that yet, but it's true. So Ann Arbor is a town that is filled with a couple of types of people, and it's these people that I will be ranting about here... and make no mistakes this will be mostly ranting.
The whole idea for this shift in focus comes from my talking to people since I have returned to the area. I have found myself working with a lot of people who are not Ann Arborites (and that is the prefered nomiclature) and started to pick up on the fact that they see Ann Arborites in a special way... As a townie I started to wonder about the things that I was hearing and seeing. A lot of them I already knew about, many of them were things that I had been seeing since High School... mostly the Hippy-ocarcy of this place.
I am going to stop and define that for you for a moment. A hippy-crit is someone that has a save the earth bumper sticker on their car, but has to use the gas powered mower every weekend to keep the grass short, and in the old days had Chem Lawn come out every other week and make the grass greener than green... that's it in a nut shell.
Other things that I have noted as of late is that there are a lot more of the Ann Arbor Crazies, and of the Angry White Men in their 50's in this town than I had remembered.....
more later.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Ann Arbor...
Just a quick note for anyone who reads this, I am going to change my focus from the Job hunt to talking about Ann Arbor, Michigan and the things about this town that annoy me. I will still do the On the Road entries just maybe not as frequently as I have in the past.
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