Issue 51: Various and Sundry
By Clancy Lass

Mouthgarden

A downward spiral can be entertaining, unless you are on the receiving end of it. Zachary Blasto, a man consumed by music, alcohol and the visions in his head, is a broken record skipping into oblivion as he tries to come to terms with loss; of love, of family and of his mind.

This is Rainbow Around the Sun, a voyeuristic thrill-ride at once beautiful, intriguing, sad, invigorating, hopeful, remorseful and stunning. The life of the medium alone has experienced a metamorphosis from concept album, staged concert and now, the movie, coming home for the Oklahoma premiere at the Dead Center Film Festival in June.

The love child of local talent Matthew Alvin Brown, Rainbow is a tour de force of the complications a mind can plague the owner with when abused by the creative forces of music, sex, and familial obligation. Blasto himself is somewhat a rainbow of personalities; different hues to different people. An asshole. A loving son. A shitty boyfriend. A mess. A musical prodigy.

Blasto is a musician hiding in his mind to avoid dealing with the problems in his disastrous life. Failing as a lover and grasping to his last moments with his father, he reflects on the stages of his life, all the while tied to his band, the musical umbilical cord sustaining what is left of his shattered heartbeat.

And no, I haven’t seen the movie. I have the album and was lucky enough to see the staged “reading” of the music last weekend on a rare night out.

Directed by Kevin Ely, (local writer and playwright of the fantastic “Feigning Grace”), and Beau Leland, with book by Ely, and all music by Brown and The Fellowship Students, the movie was chosen as an official selection of the South by Southwest Film Festival and the 2008 Florida Film Festival. Dead Center will premiere the movie opening night outdoors at 9:30 p.m. June 11th and again at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art at 5:30 p.m. June 13th.

Supporting local artists, whether in film, music or the visual or theatrical arts, is important to our community. Our state has so many creative individuals waiting to share their crafts with you. Matt Brown is one of those rare performers who truly shares a piece of his soul and inspiration while simultaneously entertaining you. He and Ely are sweet, talented, dandy men and I am thrilled to support their endeavors and call them friends. Bravo, guys.

www.rainbowaroundthesun.com
 

Issue 51: Various and Sundry
By Amdnarg Toh

An Appreciation: Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is William Thomas Fairport III, and I write this letter holding the utmost contempt for a recent review of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, and Bach published within the pages of your modern electro-zine. After the egregious review of this book by the most esteemed M. Vesuvuis, I found myself taking serious umbrage to the most villainous caricature of this classic work by Mr. Hofstadter. How could the journal of our Fair City be so horribly wrong?

As support for my thesis, I present a small excerpt from another expert, the Beligerent A. Toh:

My favorite quote in this book? On page 559 we read ‘We can now construct one of the main theses of this book’… And it took me three months of reading to get that far. And this is my second time through this book!!!

And it really does take a lot of that 559 pages to really get to the point. The reader is led through a fairly interesting discussion of symbolic logic and basic number theory, illustrated not by graphs, charts, and tables, but by an overarching series of narrative vignettes starring the recurring characters of the Turtle, Achilles, and Mr. Crab.

And…

But… This book isn’t for the faint of heart. I wouldn’t recommend it to the uninitiated, unwashed, unenlightened masses of non-geekdom. Even those with a fairly refined love of math, art, or music (or even all three) are sometimes lost in the highly technical descriptions of the MIU and TNT systems, and are totally lost when the discussion of self-referential languages, mathematical systems, and even biology turns to the technical. I’m glad it wasn’t recommended to me until I was well entrenched in grad school, and had a fair grasp of Turing Machines and automata of various stripes.

What’s significant about this book, though, is that for those “in the know” (wink, wink), it is the best work that pulls the esthetic elements of art and music into the world of mathematical theory, artificial intelligence, and graduate level computer science topics. And what’s REALLY surprising is that this book was written over 30 years ago, yet the topics discussed and theses postulated are still being validated and discussed. In a sense, it has become the “classic” work that all computer scientists should read.

And further:

Several epiphanic moments came after reading about crab canons (You’ll have to read the book). While playing the guitar, a certain pattern seemed to arise from the chord progressions and the melodies I was playing. It made some sense to me finally, but not in an aesthetic sense, but in a structured, patterned way. And the chapter I was reading in GEB provided the handles for me to be able to understand why it had “clicked” for me… Math… Patterns of numbers… The music of the spheres!!!

So… I suggest you find some REAL book reviewers, and leave the serious books to the less namby-pamby staffers out there – or I shall have to contact my close compatriot Herman T. Zweibel, whom I believe is still editor-at-large for that most heavenly paper The Onion, and have him give you a thorough tongue-lashing.

Signed,

WTF

Issue 50: Various and Sundry
By Clancy Lass

My Top Five, NC Style

The movie High Fidelity starring John Cusack and Jack Black has been frequently playing on daytime television in the recent past. I have caught it a few times, jarring how much I love that movie back into my brain, the Top Five lists especially. Since the movie debuted, I often send out five questions to my friends on Fridays, asking various things, but I realized today I had not sent the query in a while asking their all-time Top Five: your list of celebrities. In reviewing my own choices, I realized just how incredibly nerdy my preferences are, and wondered why I can’t have the normal Matthew McConaughey-hay-hay and Brad Pitt on mine. It would be so much easier than having to answer the automatic response of “Who?” for almost all of them. Both Billy Crystal and Philip Seymour Hoffman have recently been removed from the list for “out of sight, out of mind reasons,” Billy especially. I will still have mad love for them, along with Kevin Spacey, who dwelled in the Number One spot for probably close to ten years. My current list is as follows…

NUMBER FIVE – RICHARD Blaise
He’s one of those people flamboyant enough to be called just by their last name. He sports a faux-hawk and pink Crocs, rocks the Molecular Gastronomy style of cooking, and knows what to do with a blow torch. And yeah, he’s straight. Owner and designer of Trail-Blaise restaurant in Atlanta, GA, Top Chef Season 4 contestant Blaise is a welcome, tunky-nerd addition to my Top Five. He is hilarious, competitive, extremely interesting and let’s face it…a man who cooks is always a plus. I think you can win this bitch. Rock out a few more wins!

NUMBER FOUR – JEMAINE Clement
He describes his look as an “Ogre who works in a library.” I don’t have a problem with that. He is hilarious, a fantastic writer, (both screen and song), can sing and is just really strangely enticing to look at. Plus, funny will always trump sexy. It just will. I don’t care who you are. It just will.

NUMBER THREE – JOHN Linnell
The soulful eyes, inventive lyrics and penetrating voice make him an irresistible nerd welcomed to my list about three years ago. There is something to be said if you are in a room full of people watching him sing, and you feel like you are the only person there, nearly in tears because his songs are so personal. So adorably nerd-sexy.

NUMBER TWO – DAVID Wain
For several reasons, I love him. First, he is one-third of Stella. Second, he directed Wet Hot American Summer. Third, he is hot. Fourth, he recently wrote and starred in his own YouTube series called Wainy Days, which is hilarious. Fifth, one of the funniest segments of Best Week Ever was his feature on how annoying David Blain the magician was when he did his stint in the bubble thing, and started a protest outside of it saying “Quit trying to out-Blain David Wain!” Sixth, when I get my email notices on Stella, WHAS and The State, it’s often him who writes them, and he’ll write you back. Seventh, his web site is hilarious. And he’s just hot.

NUMBER ONE – MICHAEL Emerson
It was a gestational crush. I’d been a fan of his for a while because of Lost and had even seen him on Broadway in The Iceman Cometh during the Kevin Spacey days, but never had a crush on him. Then I got pregnant. And I had those hormone-induced pregnancy dreams of jungle love on Lost’s freaky-deaky island with him, and afterward he would sit on a fallen tree and tell me what was missing from the book I have been trying to write for the past year. Then I had to find everything he was in and watch it. And I had more dreams where he would be my muse, guiding my writing. He usually plays a murderer. Very well. Even Entertainment Weekly had him do his own list of top five horror movies he loves and what scary is to him because he’s creepy. And I love him. I got all the way to Waikiki this past January, where he lives during filming, but due to the Q-bert signs Writer’s Strike, he was back in New York and I was unable to stare at him. So he’s going on 55, his hair is getting sparse and he’s married. Does it really matter? He has a liquid voice, an exceptional vocabulary, is into Shakespeare and the Greeks, and taught for years. I love him.

Issue 49: Various and Sundry
By Medulla Vesuvius

The Lonely Planet: Satori in the Produce Section

I have come to love grocery store Saturdays. In the morning I’ll roll out of bed at whatever time I feel like it, go to the store with list in hand and make my rounds through the aisles at a leisurely pace. I do my best to not get run over by the people in their motorized carts who have ostensibly given up on upright life and go to the check-out counter, smile at the middle-aged cashier as a couple weeks’ worth of food goes parading between us, each item making that beep sound. Sometimes I’ll ask a particularly unenthusiastic cashier if they ever get tired of hearing the beeping. It comes from all of the registers in the store during an eight hour shift. Ceaseless-the actual sound of sustenance and commerce.

(I keep to myself the idea that I wish the cash register manufacturers would design their systems with adjustable pitches for the beeps. Imagine how much more interesting the check-out process would be if each register was tuned to a different scale degree. Every day would present the opportunity for employees to participate in a brand new aleatoric piece of music.)

Sometimes a particularly talkative cashier will observe my inclusion of some out-of-the-ordinary produce. A pack of shallots here or a colorful squash there will start a conversation like: “Wow! What’s that for?” And then I’ll tell them about a new recipe I’m trying that week.

Or sometimes I’ll want to splurge for company and pay a visit to Rhett’s Meat Market and he’ll show me the book he published about the history of early rock n’ roll records by Oklahoma musicians in between dispensing tips on the best way to cook up some lamb and how truly good, right, and salutary a stew is in the middle of winter.

All of these seemingly innocuous, insignificant human interactions combine to make life more enjoyable and interesting. Trading perspectives with fellow humans reminds me of my own humanity.

That is why last week’s Time magazine feature about “10 Ideas That Are Changing the World” sent me into a tailspin of despair. As part of the special coverage Barbara Kiviat, in “The End of Customer Service” paints a picture of a world where the cashier is no longer necessary, replaced by do-it-yourself kiosks. Here is the most troubling sentence: “Companies love self-service for the money it saves, and with consumers finally playing along, the need to interact with human beings is quickly disappearing.” Did you catch that last little bit? The need to interact is becoming a thing of the past!

This is a truly dystopian vision of the future: wandering around the store in silence with your cart, avoiding the other consumer-entities, staring fully in front of you, the only emanating sound being the ever-present beeps of computerized efficiency. Or consider doing all of your purchasing with only the company of the warm glow of your home computer’s monitor. It’s a page right out of Orwell or Huxley, the mass of humanity reduced to unrelated, lonely machines, made distinct only by their purchasing power.

Let us pray we never reach that state of total self-sufficient mechanization. For it is the collection of the inefficient elements of life, our reacting to and interacting with the wondrously unpredictable “other” that keeps us fully human, regardless of corporations and their collective bottom line.

Issue 46: Various and Sundry
By Clancy Lass

Not That Kind of Girl

Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Thriller…Those aren’t my genres. Or weren’t until I was introduced to you, my dear J.J. Abrams, and your Bad Robot productions. Oh, how I will follow you and your pop culture phenomena to the ends of the earth. How you dangle unknown actors in my face, tie me into story lines and tease me with unbearable cliff-hangers. I love you. I hate you. I can’t live without you.

It all started in 1998 with Felicity. I had nowhere to go. The tangled dorm life of a bookish girl embroiled with the bad boy, the good boy, the quirky roommate, the gay friend and the pseudo-depressive best friend; it was irresistible. I even contemplated a perm, desperate for Keri Russell’s locks.

Because of you, I actually watched Underworld because Scott Speedman was in it. And I followed you to Alias because Noel’s nerdy girlfriend was playing the lead, so you are also responsible for Jennifer Garner’s success. That’s when you really did a number on me. That isn’t my type of show: espionage, crime, judo, ridiculous stories involving death and resurrection of the same person more than once.

And yet I couldn’t turn my eyes.

You are responsible for Greg Grunberg. If you said “Who the hell is that?” you are not worthy of Nerd City. Go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done. Greg is J.J.’s go-to cameo boy: the funny guy in Felicity. The best friend in Alias. The pilot on Lost. Matt Parkman in Heroes. That’s right…soak up the shame.

Lost had been on for several weeks before I finally decided to take a look, finding out you were the producer. I thought it was Survivor, but with Matthew Fox crying, and it didn’t sound appealing at all. Yet I was instantly hooked. Then you screwed with my heart by adding Him. You know of whom I speak. My dear, sweet Ben (Michael Emerson.) Oh, how I long to have him manipulate me on a weekly basis. You are a genius. And now he is a pop culture phenomena all on his own. In fact, may I be so bold as to suggest a face-off between Michael Emerson and Michael Emerson for the Tournament of Villainy: Zep Hindle vs. Ben Linus? William Hinks vs. Allan Shaye? Gerry Rankin vs. Henry Gale? All his characters have a charming yet chilling educated civility to them…much like Magneto. …But I digress.

Now, I’m theatrically entranced by Cloverfield.

Little planned dialogue, a handheld camera, and not the cheese of Blair Witch Project; just good, simple fun and very little cursing, which surprised me from what I can assume was largely ad-libbed.

What I enjoy most is that you use largely unknown actors, gain sympathy with them because we know so little of their talents, we buy them as the person you tell us they are, then catapult them into stardom. I love it. I love how you take as much risk in the casting as you do in the concepts themselves.

I love you and your Science Fiction sexy.

Just add in a little more Ben.

Even though I’m not that kind of girl.