.:Colter:.

My friend Elizabeth is playing trombone with Patrick Wolf on Conan O’Brien this Wednesday night. I met Elizabeth during my trip to NYC last October and we became fast friends[1]. She gigs regularly as a trombonist for hire around the New York area. I once ate cotton candy off her head.

She’ll be the third person I’ve met who has been on Conan. The first and second were Bryan Beller and Mike Keneally, who played with Dweezil Zappa. Bryan has the distinction (I think) of being the first guy to take a bass solo on late night TV. Here’s the clip of the performance circa 1993, and here’s Bryan’s write-up of the experience. Mike and Bryan came through Little Rock some years ago for a guitar clinic and I took them out for pizza afterward. Here’s a picture of us. Bryan has recently moved to Nashville, which is nice. Hopefully we’ll get to hang out sometime soon.

UPDATE: Elizabeth says she’ll also be playing with a group called St. Vincent, doing several dates on the road opening for the Arcade Fire.

1.) We discovered last February that we had both recently read The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. That’s just spooky.

One of the marvelous things about NBC’s Heroes is that, like the X-Men, each character has his or her own peculiar power that is somewhat limited in application. So writing a plot must be a bit like playing a game of chess. And like chess, Heroes has two “queens,” Sylar and Peter, who can operate with all the powers of each player (something that thus far separates the characters of Heroes from the X-Men).

All of this made me wonder about chess: why are its pieces so limited in movement, and why is there only one game to be played on the chess board, with one set of “powers” for each piece? There are dozens of games that can be played with a deck of cards, so why not re-assign each chess piece a new power? For example, let’s say that a rook can teleport to any open space analagous to its current position (if it were in the far top right corner, it could teleport any of the other three corners, presuming they were open.). Perhaps knights could only move at full right angles, bishops could only land on every other diagonal tile, etc. Just a thought.

I suppose at some point, the more changes you’d make, the more chess would resemble Dungeons & Dragons, which, in a certain sense, is more complex, creative and strategic a game than chess because the powers of the pieces are constantly in flux.

This is the sort of thing I think about before I fall asleep at night.

This brings me great joy. Via DavisDVD:

“Lionsgate Home Entertainment will release fan-favorite, and one of the most requested titles, The Monster Squad on July 24th. Available on DVD for the first time, the 1980s cult classic arrives as a 2-disc 20th anniversary special edition featuring a newly mastered 16×9 anamorphic transfer, Dolby Digital 5.1 and original 2.0 stereo tracks. Bonus materials will include an audio commentary with writer/director Fred Dekker and “Squad Members” Andre Gower, Ryan Lambert and Ashley Bank, deleted scenes, “MONSTER SQUAD FOREVER!” five-part retrospective featuring new interviews with Dekker, actors Andrew Gower, Ryan Lambert, Ashley Bank, Duncan Regehr, Tom Noonan and more, “A CONVERSATION WITH FRANKENSTEIN” never-before-seen classic interview with the Monster himself, the original theatrical trailer and TV spot. Retail will be $19.98.”

This may be a record for most sequels in a summer, and certainly for the most Part Threes ever:

Part Twos:
28 Weeks Later
Hostel 2
Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
Evan Almighty
Daddy Day Camp

Part Threes:
The Bourne Ultimatum
Rush Hour 3
Spiderman 3
Shrek The Third
Ocean’s 13
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End

Part Four:
Live Free Or Die Hard

Part Five:
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix

Television as we know it will be dead soon. Everyone will have a DV-R at some point and we will skip commercials, rendering your revenue source nearly nil. What you must do to survive is this: digitize your entire catalog of old programming (if you’re smart enough to have saved the tapes) and offer your own YouTube-style service in which you can sell website ad space. You’re sitting on a goldmine of over 50 years of programming you thought you’d only air once or syndicate for reruns. But we want that content on-demand. Especially the nightly talk shows of which there are so many episodes that DVD just isn’t feasible: classic Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, early David Letterman in particular. You’ve got it and we want it. For example, I want to be able to go CBS’s website and search on “Mel Torme Buddy Rich” and find this choice gem from Merv Griffin’s show in 1978.

We want to be able to watch what we want, when we want. It’s your content; you control it. If you build it, we will come. So get to work. It’s your only chance to survive.

How to deal with being a young, unproven show in a time wherein more and more people are skipping commercials with DV-R’s and TiVo? Product placement. How to build in product placement, yet do it in such a way that you retain creative credibility? Answer: talk about product placement in the script. All the more “meta” is the fact that Studio 60 is a show about a show. So while the characters are talking ever so specifically about adding product placement for Gibson Guitars, I recall wondering why I’ve seen Gibson and Epiphone[1] banners around the set.

Add to all this the fact that last week’s episode talks about a spinoff show (see the other show about a show, 30 Rock, and its relationship to SNL), and you’ve got a complete loss of suspension of disbelief, which is the only problem I keep having with Studio 60. Fortunately it will be around for another season.

1.) Gibson-owned brand.

I picked up the new Transformers: The Movie DVD, and there are some interesting bonus features and commentaries that shed a lot of light on the toy business. Everyone involved in the production seems to make some mention of the fact that what they did was just a job, a gig, and for some reason this surprised me. Maybe I always assumed there was a team of creative people somewhere at Hasbro or Takara that put all these characters together and gave them personalities and life. As it turns out, the Japanese developed the toys, while the gang at Hasbro decided to call them “Transformers” and left the naming and character development to essentially one guy, a comic book writer. Sunbow produced the cartoons, and took the character development from there, adding in the voice talent to bring life to each character.

Upon discovering this, I began to realize that what made Transformers great was a combination of ingenious toys, plus the commercial art of the voice talent and a comic book writer. Everyone involved essentially viewed the project as just another job with no real passionate attachment to it, which is a real credit to the pop art of it all. The fans cared about the whole universe, and never stopped caring. We developed emotional attachments to a product line, and this was never more apparent than in the reaction to the death of Optimus Prime in the film. I’m still fascinated by the interaction of emotions to commerce that this DVD has presented.

I’m reminded of the time, in 4th or 5th grade I think it was, that I designed my own line of Transformers called the Aquabots. There never were a lot of boats in the Transformers universe, so I drew up a team of five combiners that made one larger robot. My mom attempted to get the attention of Hasbro, but they replied that they did not take on outside creative projects. Now I know why. They didn’t even have an in-house creative team! They’d get the robots from Japan, send them to Bob Budiansky for a name and a personality, and send them on to Marvel and Sunbow to add to the cartoon. Just cranking out the units. And yet somewhere in the mix there was a spark that got kids excited enough to make an emotional connection.

No, it’s not the name of a new Mr. Bungle CD, it’s 1975’s The Devil’s Rain starring John Travolta, William Shatner and Ernest Borgnine. Plus Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, and technical advisor Anton LaVey. I’ll leave you with The Onion A.V. Club’s article, but before I do, know that it contains the phrases “Borgnine’s ring of satanic evil” and “Satan is real and really has it in for William Shatner.”

I was listening to a live version of Frank Zappa’s “King Kong” this morning and Frank introduced the tune by saying this:

The name of this song is “King Kong.” It’s a story of a very large gorilla who lived in the jungle, and he was doing OK until some Americans came by and thought that they would take him home with them. They took him to the United States and they made some money by using the gorilla. Then they killed him.”

Often have I heard that the Godzilla movies were a subconscious metaphor for World War II and Pearl Harbor’s awakening of a “sleeping giant” in the minds of the Japanese. So I wonder if King Kong isn’t subconsciously a parable about Black America: we went into the jungle and brought people back to make money off of them and we mistreated and often killed them. Certainly we killed their sense of cultural and religious identity.

It may be a stretch, but it would be a better explanation for the incredibly iconic status of King Kong in American film history than just the film’s special effects. Why else would a story of a giant primate on the rampage, who runs off with a (white) girl be so fascinating to so many? Would the film have worked if Kong were any other animal but a lower primate, so close to us evolutionarily, and to many minds in the early/mid 20th century, a closer relative to blacks than whites? I’ve always been at a loss to explain the appeal of King Kong. I never saw the recent remake, because I knew the story and wasn’t very excited by it the first time. This larger allegory makes sense to me, at least.

Finally. Kicking and Screaming will be available on Criterion Collection DVD, August 22.

Life just keeps getting better all the time.