A proper post

I’ve been preoccupied for the past few weeks so, blogging has been sparse. It’s a good thing though, nothing bad going on, knock on wood.

But a lot has been going on, both at work and at home. Music Madness is keeping me plenty busy, and is so much fun to handle, I’ll miss it when the tournament is over. Sometimes I can’t believe people pay me money to do the things I love to do. Seems too good to be true.

We’re losing our awesome video guy though, which kind of sucks. He’s going to go into the wild and wacky world of bar ownership, which I find odd, but somehow fitting for him. I guess it just seems weird to completely 180 on your career like that. But he seems really excited about it, so I wish him the best. This means the paper is hiring back our other videographer who was laid off recently. Luckily, he’s cool with coming back, and he’s also pretty good so that means we don’t have to spend time training someone new as we head into a busy sports season.

At home, the kid is finally just about done making Kelly’s veil. It’s turning out so pretty. Kelly will look beautiful in it. Also saw some pictures of the spot where they’re getting hitched and my god – it’s freaking gorgeous. It’s on a congressman’s property in Big Sur (he will also officiate) and is just at the edge of a beatiful cliff looking out over the Pacific. It’s stunning.

The wedding is coming up faster than I expected. My poor sister is subconsciously stressed about planning a big wedding on the other side of the country from her (she won’t admit it, but she beat the crap out of her laptop the other night, so I’m thinking, yeah, stress.) so I keep asking her if, as main of honour, I can do anything to help out and make things go smoothly but so far there’s nothing. I’m cracking the whip on the veil though.

Let’s see what else… Ah, my Swedish lessons continue. I’m loving it, but just when I think I’m doing really well, my underbara teacher lets loose with a huge conversational sentence and I just gape at him. Don’t think I’m going to master the language any time soon 🙂 But I can say things like, “Hur mycket kostar det?,” “Jag har gÃ¥tt vilse,”  and “Kittla inte mina fötter,” which will come in handy if I’m ever lost and wondering how much it would cost to have someone stop tickling my feet.

Swedish is interesting to me because when you look at a simple sentence, it looks completely, well, foreign. But sometimes, when you say it out loud, the sounds are very similar to English, as if you’re speaking English with a bizarre accent. I love it. I’m told I’m picking it up pretty quick so that’s good. Love languages and always wanted to learn others apart from French. I know a smattering of Spanish, a titch of German and a few Russian words, but learning/becoming fluent in more languages is on my Do Before You Die list.

For the past 2 days I’ve been listening to the 70s channel on XM. I finally got tired of Fred on 44 which played Bauhaus’ ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ just one time too many and switched to the 50s channel. But other than Matt’s show each night, I’m not fond of the other DJs or their shows. So I switched to 60s which was cool. Listened to that for quite a while before I decided I couldn’t take one more episode of “Chicken Man” and so now I’m the 70s. This one’s a little harder to take. There is a ton of 70s music I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing again. But as I’ve discovered doing Music Madness, there is actually a lot of 70s stuff I always loved but never realized it was from that decade. Go figure. So I’m enjoying it for the most part, and tuning out when something crappy comes on.

Well, totally meant to go to bed early for once, and blew that with a rambling-about-nothing bedtime blog 🙂

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50 1-Hit Wonders

Ok I don’t often post links to this sort of stuff – or maybe I do, I don’t know, I’ve had a lot of caffeine today and the brain’s gone kerflooey. But this list of 50 one-hit wonders, complete with audio, is just about the coolest link I’ve come across in weeks.

A random sampling of my spastic tweets and IMs to Kelly:

  • Somehow I knew tainted love would be in this
  • Omg THAT’S what soft cell dudes look like?
  • Do the HUSTLE!
  • Ohhh yeah, Taco’s Puttin’ on the Ritz is the best song ever. Gene Wilder’s version excepted.

Go, enjoy. Get your nostalgia on.

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Just a quick one

Shannon is making Kelly’s wedding veil. At first I worried that perhaps this project would be a bit much for my crafty kid, but I’m delighted to say I am being proved wrong. I really must stop underestimating her talents.

Not the best pic, but then it wasn’t taken with my spiffycool digi 🙂 Will post better ones later.

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Hej!

Hej alla! Varför förmiddag mig handstil i svensk? Därför att jag kan! Och därför att I-förmiddagen lära det språket lite och det har varit rolig.

I’m pretty sure the translator I used butchered what I said there, but that’s ok. So wtf did I say? “Hi everyone! Why am I writing in Swedish? Because I can! I am learning the language and it is fun.” 🙂 Or something. I met someone in Sweden who is teaching me a few words here and there (and is very patient with my horrible pronunciations.) It’s a fun language though! I heart the interwebs!

Other than that I don’t have a whole lot to report. Saw Batman last weekend and loved the ever-loving hell out of it. Heath Ledger’s performance was disturbingly awesome and Christian Bale is just amazing. Thing about him is, I don’t believe he’ll be stuck with a stereotype for playing a superhero in a blockbuster film. He already has an impressive catalogue of quirky movies to his credit (American Psycho, Little Women, Swing Kids, Equilibrium to name a few) and he’ll go on to more like that. He’s doing the new Terminator movie which, yeah, another blockbuster type but man does it look bad-ass.

Anyway, so yeah, saw Batman. What else…. Oh! Got asked to host the episode 3 commentary for the second season of BBtL. Should be fun! And my co-writer and I have finished writing our scenes for the first episode of Angel Between the Lines and all that’s left is to put our halves together and make it flow, do some tweaking, and then hand our baby in. Over a month ahead of the deadline too 🙂 yay us!

Speaking of writing, I seem to have lost the plot a bit on my CherryPop story. And by that I mean, I haven’t wriiten anything in a month apart from one ficlet sequel. I need to focus on that. Watching all these Twitter updates from people at Comic-Con this weekend meeting their favourite authors and thinking that I would love to be someone’s favourite author someday. Won’t happen though if I don’t kick myself in the ass and get into it. I will find a way though.

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Where’s Melia?

I’ll skip all of the ‘I know, I haven’t blogged in a while and here’s why’ crap. I don’t have a really good reason other than general busy-ness and lack of a desire to post to this one. I haven’t been Ficleting either which sort of breaks my heart a little. So I’ve sworn to get back to it, and posted another little chapter in the life of CherryPop. It might re-awaken my desire to write again. It’s been slacking.

I’ve been working a big project at work, sort of Movie Madness redux, this time with music. I’ve been on my own as far as figuring out how to power this thing and make it fun and I don’t think I’ve done too badly. It’s drawing over 5-600 pageviews a day so far. Yay! So that’s taken up a lot of time.

Between movies I must see, BBQs, family visiting, and a new addiction to Second Life, Blogging’s just been on the back burner. But no more! I’m looking forward to jumping back in on all of the blogs. So this is a sort of “I’m back” post. More will be coming, for I must review Dr. Horrible and Batman 🙂

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I’m not afraid to admit it

I love this movie. Yes, I love the 1978 movie, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and I’ll tell you why. Well I don’t know if I can explain why I love this almost universally hated movie. People actually cringe if it’s mentioned. “They butchered the sacred band that is The Beatles” is the typical response. I don’t think so. I think it’s a novel take on a collection of weird Beatles songs. It’s such a time machine to the 70s really.

Now, I hate the 70s. That’s an entire decade that makes me cringe. But I have “issues” that I’m now coming to terms with and I’m starting to give up some of that hatred. It was brought home to me while preparing for Music Madness at the paper when I realized that there are a rather large number of songs from the 70s that I actually love. In my defense, I didn’t know they came out in that decade. Most cases, I never heard them til i was older and more aware of music which didn’t happen until the early 80s for me.

But I digress. I was talking about Frampton and the Bee Gees and Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, all of whom appeared/performed in the movie. Now, my mother was a huge Beatles fan, and listening to her old records growing up sort of made me mildly interested in them. It was seeing this movie that cultivated that interest. It came out in 1978, when I was 7. I don’t recall whether I saw it in the cinema, but I do remember it being on TV. I was fascinated with it. I was sort of developing a bit of a crush on Peter Frampton and Shaun Cassidy at the time. Nothing major – I mean, I was 7 for frak’s sake. (Sorry, been watching Battlestar Galactica.)

I loved the music in the movie. The Bee Gees were HUGE back then so I guess that’s the sound I was familiar with. But most of all, I loved the story. They made real characters out of songs! That amazed me. Billy Shears. Mr. Kite. Strawberry Fields. The Hendersons. Mean Mr. Mustard. Basically it was like they were dabbling their toes in the video waters that were to come along in a few years.

The movie’s basic plotline is this: Sgt. Pepper and his band came from a town called Heartland, and their music and their instruments were imbued with some kind of peace-making magic or something. Anyway, the band enjoyed over 50 years of happy times and good music until the tradition was passed on to Sgt. Pepper’s grandson, Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and his friends, the Henderson brothers (the Bee Gees.)

Now, Billy is in love with a girl named Strawberry Fields, who is sweet and pretty and wholesome and the whole town and it’s citizens are right out of Mayberry. Until the boys get a telegram telling them that some bigwig in L.A. heard their music and invites them out to record an album. The band goes, and are soon exposed to all manner of corruption – drugs, sex, lots of money. At first the boys are overwhelmed and succomb.

Meanwhile, back in Heartland, the town has been taken over by Mean Mr. Mustard, a corrupt real estate agent who turns out to be under the thumb of F.V.B. he turns the town into a hotbed of arcades, hookers and foreclosures. His main goal though, is to steal Sgt. Pepper’s instruments which are housed in a museum at city hall. F.V.B. orders him to take each intrument to other corrupt people, which he does.

Now, Strawberry Fields has left home (‘She’s Leaving Home’) to find Billy and tell him what’s happening. When she finds him, she gets jealous when she sees the chick from another band (Lucy and the Diamonds) draped all over him. But eventually, she tells him and the band sets off to recover the instruments.

I know I said “basic plot” but I’m finding it requires a longer explanation. It’s a weird movie 🙂

They get the instruments back (and we get a couple great scenes in which Steve Martin, in his film debut, plays a psycho plastic surgeon, Dr. Maxwell Edison, and his performance of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ is fun, and Alice Cooper plays a brainwashing ex-crossing guard called Father Sun, and he performs ‘Because’ in a trippy, acidic way.)

Anyway, the band holds a benefit (for Mr. Kite 🙂 Kite is played by George Burns who is the town’s mayor and the film’s narrator.) for Heartland and Earth, Wind & Fire perform. But Mr. Mustard, who’s in love with Strawberry, kidnaps her and takes her to F.V.B. The boys are in pursuit.

Now, F.V.B stands for Future Villain Band in the standout scene that was my first-ever exposure to Aerosmith – and they scared me. Yes Aerosmith is F.V.B., and while Strawberry is tied to a wobbly electric dollar sign up on a platform, Aerosmith slither up the stairs singing ‘Come Together’ – and it’s fantastic and creepy and slightly sexually uncomfortable.

There’s a big fight between Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and Steve Tyler and in the end, Strawberry is knocked off the platform and killed. As a seven year-old used to happy endings, this shocked me. It made me sad then, and I still get a little misty at this scene and the following scenes of her funeral (‘Golden Slumbers,’ ‘Carry that Weight,’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road.’) I’m afraid I always have and always will associate those three songs with the death of Strawberry Fields.

Gosh this is longer than I intended. Anyway to wrap it up, just as Billy is about to jump off a building to commit suicide, a Deus Ex Machina appears in the form of the town’s weathervane monument coming to life with magic powers to set everything right – including bringing Strawberry back to life. It’s actually Billy Preston performing ‘Get back’ and doing a nifty little boogie around the town square. Everyone’s happy again and for the finale, a plethora of Big 70s stars stand on a bunch of risers and sing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ Some big names in there too – like Tina Turner, Keith Carradine, Donovan, Carol Channing, leif Garrett (dreamy sigh – hey, I was 7!), Heart, Dame Edna, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Palmer, WIlson Pickett, Sha-na-na, and Wolfman Jack.

Now, I know I’ve made this out to be a very cool, very exciting movie not to be missed. I left out that it’s unbelievably cheesy, silly, requires some major belief suspension, and at times, kind of stupid. I revisit it every couple of years or so and it holds up for me, though some may beg to differ. But I will always love it.

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