Skip to content

Entertainment

Another Reason Why I Love The Current

I vividly remember the day Rev105 changed formats. My wife and I were leaving work and climbed into the car in the carpool lot. Turning on the car, Van Halen was playing. I was surprised, but I’ve always been a Van Halen fan, and dug that they were playing it. Rev105 was the most eclectic radio station I’ve ever listened to, and while I was surprised to hear Van Halen, it wasn’t out of the norm from some of the things they played. And then another hard rock song came on, and another – and they announced the new call letters, X105. And just like that, my favorite radio station was dead.

The latest Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were announced a week and a half ago. To celebrate, 89.3 The Current played a number of the inductees, including:

  • Hall and Oates
  • Linda Rondstadt
  • Cat Stevens
  • Peter Gabriel

Mary Lucia was driving to work when they played the above artists and missed Barb Abney’s introduction to the set list. Her reaction was hilarious, along with the voicemail she left to Jill Riley, co-host of the morning show on The Current:

I FREAKED out! Not another format change! This isn’t happening again! I was convinced we had flipped formats overnight and this was my way of finding out I no longer had a job at the Current.

I know this sounds overly dramatic, but friends, this has happened to me before in my radio career: One day I have a job, and the next day we are playing Scorpions and Nazareth. BOOM! “Thanks for all of your hard work, now who needs a box to pack up your [stuff]?”

Hit the link to read her reaction, listen to the voicemail and the Twitter reactions by people around the Twin Cities.

Kudos to The Current for sharing this – it brought a smile to my face.

All Things Blade Runner

Over thirty years later, Blade Runner still remains one of my favorite films (as I’ve previously blogged about).  It was only six weeks ago that I sat down and watched it again – it is easily one of the movies I can watch over and over and still enjoy with a sense of wonder.

I’m not the only one who shares a passion for Blade Runner, as fans have paid tribute to the classic film in a few ways in 2013:

Blade Runner: 8 Bit Cinema – here is the film re-told as a classic video game.  If only this was a real game! (Via Gizmodo)

[//www.youtube.com/embed/OM6z9czN318]

Moments Lost: Music and Art inspired by Blade Runner. This is an IndieGoGo campaign to create a full length soundtrack using Vangelis’ original recording equipment. (Vangelis did the original soundtrack to the film). It will also include 8 stories and 8 illustrations as part of the fundraising campaign.

[//www.youtube.com/embed/PFCnJ-R33jw]

Lastly, here is Blade Runner done as 12,000 hand painted water color paintings.  As Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing wrote:

The absolutely stunning work of Swedish artist Anders Ramsell, who painted each frame as a 1.5 x 3cm work of art. It’s taken him a while to complete the epic job; Pesco wrote about the first three minutes last year. The end result runs about 30 minutes, which is exactly how long Blade Runner should be.

 

[//www.youtube.com/embed/SLwmlMezS3U]

The return of OMNI

I vividly remember reading Omni Magazine growing up, both in my local library and my high school’s library. The mix of science writing and science fiction stories were fantastical and helped shape me for years to come. It was there I first encountered the writing of George R.R. Martin with his story Sandkings and other authors I would read as an adult.

Glenn Fleishman wrote recently at Boing Boing about who owns the copyrights of the former magazine:

Weintraub believes she has as good an explanation for Omni’s limbo as anyone: General Media never owned it, she said. To her knowledge, it was privately owned by Keeton and Guccione. As far as she knows, and I have found no contradiction, the various rights to the magazine would have been transferred to some creditor of Guccione’s — but it’s possible the creditor didn’t even realize that it had obtained these rights. And, in any case, those rights only seemingly include the work-for-hire pieces.

No party has appeared to ask the Internet Archive or Omni Magazine Online to take down any material. The authors and artists whose work appeared in the publication and which is available through the Internet Archive could ostensibly assert a right, but it would require substantial documentation to qualify under the DMCA since no party asserts ownership to Omni as a collective work.

Mr. Fleishman’s article is also a fascinating recap of the rise and fall of the magazine. Today, Mr. Fleishman breaks the news that Jeremy Frommer, whom we learned in the first article bought a storage locker with the production archives in Omni, is planning on relaunching Omni next week as Omni Reboot.

He is also interested in reissuing Omni’s far-ahead-of-its-time comics collections, and has been talking to the artists who appeared in the three editions produced. If he can get the rights worked out, he may republish those and then commission a fourth book along the same lines.

The best news, however, isn’t about the past, but about next week. Omni Reboot is a new publication, edited by Claire L. Evans, a writer and artist. It goes live next week. Frommer says they have hired writers and artists to bring what he calls the “Omni vibe” to 2013, and they want fresh blood, not just established practitioners. To all happy mutants, Frommer says, come aboard. “Those visionary writers who believe in that Omni vibe, they should reach out to me.”

The site is just a placeholder until next week, but I know I can’t wait and will be frequently refreshing the page.

Old issues of OMNI at the Brownell Library by Rob Friesel under a CC-BY-NA license.

Henry Rollins – Spoken Word

Henry Rollins spoken word CDs

I don’t remember how I was first introduced to Henry Rollins and his spoken word performances. I know it was a long, long time ago and when I first purchased the CD Box Set of his albums, it was over twenty years ago now. I wore those CDs out and they helped me drive cross-country at least once.

For a man who got his start in punk music singing for Black Flag, Henry may be the closest thing we have to a Renaissance man. He sings and writes music, writes poetry, acts, and tours non-stop on his spoken word tours. His stories are touching, funny, and over the last 10 years, he has become much more political with his messages, in a good way. Just don’t read his poetry – after I first got into Henry, I bought a couple of his books, and it was the darkest, most depressing poetry I’ve ever read. But when you see him live on a spoken word tour, he’s mesmerizing.

I haven’t listened to the CDs or watched a video in quite a while – but Boing Boing linked to JWZ’s site today, with some videos of Henry doing his spoken word thing. Next thing I know, an hour has gone by and I have a craving for some more Rollins.

I’m a bit disappointed to see Netflix doesn’t have any of his shows available any more. But I know what I’ll be listening to while I work this week.

(Via Boing Boing)

Can arcades make a comeback?

2013-02-16 14.06.36

Having been born in the early 70’s, I am a child of the 80’s. One of the best parts of being a child of the 80’s was living through the boom (and later bust) of the arcades. Whether it was going to Godfather’s Pizza and playing a handful of arcade games or Chuck E. Cheese with dozens of games or getting dropped off at an arcade in a mall while my parents went shopping, the fun in plugging quarters in for hours can never be re-lived.

Or can it? In the last year, two arcades have popped up in the Twin Cities. Rusty Quarters, in South Minneapolis, opened last year and has an impressive list of arcade cabinets available for play at $0.50 per play.

Zap-Arcade, located in Jordan, almost an hour from the Twin Cities (but only 15-20 minutes from where I live in the suburbs) also opened last year and has a unique pricing model. You can buy a day pass for $5.00 or family pass for $15.00 and play all of the games for as long as you want to stay. They also have monthly plans available.

The kids had a blast, but they didn’t know better. Zap Arcade has two floors, with 12 cabinets one each floor. I was disappointed with the games available. They had three “A” games available – Pac-Man (a re-issue, which featured about 8 different ways to play Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man), Space Invaders, and Galaga (which wasn’t working). They had a few “B” titles – Double Dragon, Araknoid, X-Men, Zaxxon, and Raiden. The rest were third tier titles which few people would remember from the hey day of the 80’s. All the games were on free play, though there were times you had to grab an employee to open up the cabinet to add more credits.

The price was right – for two hours of entertainment for a family of 4, it was far cheaper than going to a movie and the kids had a blast. I was worried that Jack, who is only seven, would get frustrated, but he was happy to bounce from game to game trying different things and didn’t get frustrated.

I was happy to see the place was busy. We got there fairly early after opening, and more people and families filled the place up quickly over the course of the two hours we were there. Hopefully they will be stay busy over time giving them some revenue to buy even more cabinets. We’ll definitely be back.

If you, like me, are nostalgic for arcades, The Verge has a great look back on the rise and fall of the arcade industry.

Alan Moore & the Guy Fawkes Mask

Alan Moore talk to The Guardian about V for Vendetta and the use of the Guy Fawkes mask he created for V for Vendetta and its use by Occupy.

It is an irony noted with relish by critics of the protests – one also glumly acknowledged by many of the protesters – that the purchase of so many _Vendetta _masks has become a lucrative little side-earner for Time Warner, the media company that owns the rights to Moore’s creation. Efforts have been made to avoid feeding the conglomerate more cash, the Anonymous group reportedly starting to import masks direct from factories in China to circumvent corporate pockets; last year, demonstrators at a “Free Julian Assange” event in Madrid wore cardboard replicas, apparently self-made. But more than 100,000 of the £4-£7 masks sell every year, according to the manufacturers, with a cut always going to Time Warner. Does that irk Moore?

“I find it comical, watching Time Warner try to walk this precarious tightrope.” Through contacts in the comics industry, he explains, he has heard that boosted sales of the masks have become a troubling issue for the company. “It’s a bit embarrassing to be a corporation that seems to be profiting from an anti-corporate protest. It’s not really anything that they want to be associated with. And yet they really don’t like turning down money – it goes against all of their instincts.” Moore chuckles. “I find it more funny than irksome.”

Oh, poor Time Warner and your moral dilemmas.  If only that was the least of your troubles.