Good Morning!! I’ve spent the past two days just trying to hold it together. I’m just glad tomorrow is Friday and maybe Trump will go play golf and leave us alone for awhile. Oh wait, I just remembered he’s going to the G7 this weekend. I may have to avoid TV, radio, and the internet […]
via Thursday Reads: Trump Is Really Losing It This Time. — Sky Dancing
Just this past week, I read this and this (a video of Fritts’ disgusting sermon calling for the execution of LGBTQ people is linked in the article, if you can stand to watch it). I felt literally sick to my stomach after reading these articles (and watching that awful video) and almost had to vomit. Fritts, […]
Is tech disrupting spirituality, or is spirituality finally disrupting tech?
via Can Tech Become Ethical, If It Learns to Be Mindful First? — Longreads
Roll ’em out. Bring on the bad animals. Let’s hear it for Night of the Lepus, Food of the Gods, Empire of the Ants–Grizzly!!!
Back in the day, following Jaws (1975) there were a slew of Giant Animal pictures meant to capitalize on people’s fear of nature, the perception of nature gone wild and taking her revenge on mankind. The environmental movement was still in its infancy, which also had to factor into the prevalence of these flicks. Few of them were of Jaws-level quality, although Food of the Gods at least had an H.G. Wells pedigree. And really–giant carnivorous rabbits? Oh Deforest Kelley, how far you’d fallen. To be fair, Night of the Lepus had the excuse that it was released in 1972, three years before Jaws redefined terror.
Where does Grizzly fit into this? Released in 1976, a year after Jaws, it was spawned by a family outing where producer & writer Harvey Flaxman’s family had encountered a bear. Rightly panned as a Jaws rip-off, it had the virtue of including Teddy, an eleven-foot Kodiak bear as the title villain. Inadvertently it reunited actors Christopher George, Andrew Prine and Richard Jaeckal, who’d also appeared in supporting roles in John Wayne’s Chisum (1970). George is Mike Kelly, the Park Ranger with the dubious task of tracking down this ursine interloper; Prine is Don Stober, the unfortunate helicopter pilot, and Jaeckal as naturalist Arthur Scott.
The film does have its pluses. How often do we get to see a bear tear down a look-out tower? Although the species in question, Arctodus ursos horribilis was a conceit invented for the film, it was based on the giant Pleistocene Era species of Short-Faced bears. These bears, of which there were two species in North America, were about the size of a grizzly but not as heavily built. It may also be one of those rare instances where you find the dumbest thing a person’s ever done, alongside the smartest thing a person’s ever done.
Dumb action first. Two hikers have already been killed. The killer has been positively identified as a bear. Armed with this knowledge, what does this beautiful Park Rangerette do? She goes skinny-dipping in a waterfall. Guess who’s behind the falls? Oh, here comes Teddy!
The movie climaxes with the smartest act. Kelley and Stober finally track down the bear, who takes down their helicopter and kill the hapless pilot. In desperation Kelley fires a bazooka right at the bear, which is vaporized in a shower of blood. Yeah, come back from that, you S.O.B.! All in all Grizzly was a cut above the rest…a slight cut, considering the competition, nonetheless…
LINKS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_(film
Mikes’ latest book, FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS, is available at amazon.com. Mike’s Amazon page:
https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Michael-Robbins/e/B00CMHSMYA
Looking ahead a bit, I think. This sketch details where I want to take Jamai, although to be perfectly frank, this brash happy version, confident in herself and her sexuality, will have to pass through fire getting to this point. That’s where the third book in the trilogy, Sanity’s Edge, will take her. I’ll keep you posted.
Mikes’ latest book, FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS, is still available at amazon.com. Mike’s Amazon page:
https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Michael-Robbins/e/B00CMHSMYA
So many blogs have been written about the last legendary concert appearance by John Lennon, alongside Elton John in Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1974. Clearly you’d think there was nothing new to say. The problem with all these pieces is that they all say THE SAME DAMN THINGS–it’s John Lennon’s last live show, he and Yoko got back together after the show, he’d done it after a bet over his hit single “Whatever Gets You Through the Night”, yada yada. No one ever talks about the actual performance.
Ya know what? I’m not going over all that crap again. We know it. I’m going to leave some links at the end of this blog, if that’s the kind of background you want. This is my blog, my observations. The rest you can easily find elsewhere.
Among the frequent hand-me-downs from my brother Kenny was an Elton John Band single from 1975, “Philadelphia Freedom” (MCA-40364), a damn good song in its own right. The B-side, ‘Recorded Live’ the year before, was “I Saw Her Standing There”. Beneath the song title in small letters it read ‘Featuring John Lennon’.
I didn’t know he’d done a live show with Elton John, beyond that one song. I wasn’t reading a lot of the nascent rock music press; I was barely aware there WAS one. Oh I knew about Rolling Stone, peripherally. My thing was comic books, Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 and the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre. Those were my ways of distracting myself from my dad’s marriages and divorces, our frequent moving back in forth between two towns. From the time my mom and dad split up to the beginning of high school, I’d attended three elementary schools and bounced three times between two junior highs. I was also learning how to impale myself with insulin shots, after five years of having them inflicted on me.
-two examples of the inevitable bootlegs-
Putting the foregoing aside, I think I was very lucky, certainly better off because of my parents and siblings. Back to cases, that single was the only official release of that singular performance, outside of the inevitable bootlegs. Elton’s live LP Here and Now (1976) was a contract-fulfillment item. While good, it was a truncated single-LP collection culled from two performances done a year apart. Side One was taken from a London performance for invalid children at the Royal Festival Hall in May1974; Side Two from the aforementioned Madison Square Garden show.
In the 1970s an Elton John concert was a thing not to be missed. And because I was underage, I always did; I didn’t turn 16 years old until May of 1980. In 1995 Gus Dudgeon compiled a 2-CD album of both concerts in their entirety. CD-2 features that long-lost three-song set featuring John and Elton: “Whatever Gets You Through the Night”, “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “I Saw Her Standing There”. I’ve just finished listening to those CDs today in my car. I’m here to rate that performance while it’s still strong in my head.
Just to start with right after Elton’s introduction, while John is tuning his guitar I heard a few bars of “I Feel Fine”. I’d listened to this deluxe CD before and I’d never noticed that before. Both Johns give an energetic performance of “Whatever gets You Through the Night”, and I’ll bet John Lennon was having more fun doing this than he’s had in years. No politics, no preaching, just two guys duetting beautifully together, jamming on pure rock ‘n’ roll.
John is less prominent on “Lucy In The Sky”, but it IS Elton’s cover. He’s there for backing vocals and reggae rhythm guitar; you can hear his guitar in the right channel on your stereo. What’s never mentioned is the fact that this is the ONLY time John Lennon performed “Lucy” live in any capacity. The Muscle Shoals Horns blowing in the chorus add an extra zest to the live version.
Finally John announces “a number from an old estranged fiancée of mine called Paul”, the first and only time he sang “I Saw Her Standing There”, as it was always Paul’s vocal. With Elton’s band behind him, John gives a roaring performance, vastly superior to the pussified version that Tiffany foisted on us in 1988. Really, how DARE she emasculate a Beatles classic that way? There were tears all around, and Elton allowed the pandemonium to go on and on, even though he still had 40 minutes left to go in his concert.
That was John’s last glory moment on a live stage, almost the last anyone would hear of him for five years. The times we would have with him during his brief comeback season in 1980 would be too tragically short.
Available on: “I Saw Her Standing There”, released as the B-side to Elton John’s single “Philadelphia Freedom”, MCA 40364, released February 24, 1975.
The entire set with both Johns appeared on the complete 2-CD reissue of Elton’s 1976 live album, Here and There (1996 Rocket)
Links:
John Lennon joins Elton John onstage at Madison Square Garden, New York
The harvest of Beatlemania of 1964 continued with their third Capitol album in a seventh-month period, Something New, a title which wasn’t that true at all. To summarize, The Beatles’ Second Album had only been released on April 10. The United Artists’ version of A Hard Day’s Night (US) was an abridged version of the original Parlophone (UK) LP. However, the US LP preceded the better UK version by two weeks (release dates, June 26 for United Artists vs. July 10 for Parlophone).
U.S. v., A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
and the original Parlophone release
With me so far? It gets better. Something New followed the UK Hard Day’s Night by ten days and less than a month after the US LP. If this album has any weakness, it’s the lack of a strong lead single. On the other hand, apart from “Slow Down’ and “Matchbox”, it is notably lacking in the cover songs that would fill their LPs up through Beatles For Sale, or Beatles VI, depending on which continent you were born on.
Anal details: eight of its eleven tracks had already appeared on the original A Hard Day’s Night; five of those songs had already appeared the month before on the United Artists’ album. It would be the third album release for “I’ll Cry Instead”, which we never even got to hear in the movie! Side One closes with two songs from the British Long Tall Sally EP. I’ll get to the song that closes in a bit. “A Hard Day’s Night”, “I Should Have Known Better” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” had already appeared on both/either Hard Day’s Night LPs. The only remaining orphans from the Parlophone album were “You Cant Do That”, which had already appear on The Beatles’ Second Album in April; and “I’ll Be Back”, relegated to Beatles ’65, soon to be released in December 1964.
Also of note, on the trivial side, in addition to being released in Mono, it was the only early Beatles album where all tracks were in true stereo. Alternate versions of “Any Time at All”, “I’ll Cry Instead”, “When I Get Home”, “If I Fell” and “And I Love Her” appear in the Mono mix. Parlophone released Something New to US Armed Forces bases in Europe; today those copies are appropriately great collector’s items. The German stereo version on the Odeon label has a reprocessed stereo version of “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand” and an extended version of “And I Love Her” that repeats the closing riff six times instead of the familiar four. This mix appears on the US version of the now-defunct LP Rarities (1980). In 2004 the album was released on CD as part of the box set The Capitol Years, Volume I.
All fine, but how does it sound??? Despite being A Hard Day’s Night Redux, it’s actually a pretty listenable album. “I’ll Cry Instead” gets it off to a rocking start; “Things We Said Today” was a reflection on Paul’s relationship with actress Jane Asher. “If I Fell” and “And I Love Her” were two of John and Paul’s most tender love songs; given their relative youth, it’s surprising how much depth and maturity they could fit into two and a half minutes each.
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-beatles-only-german-recordings-4075314
http://www.beatlesebooks.com/komm-gib-mir-deine-hand
The final track, “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”, was a German language recording of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. It wasn’t something they really wanted to do, and in the end they had to be dragged to the studio in Paris to get the job done. It wasn’t unknown for American artists in the ’60’s to record foreign-language versions of their biggest hits. The Temptations for example did the Beatles one better by recording “My Girl” not only in German but in Italian as well.
For “Komm…”, the band used the original instrumental track, then recorded eleven vocal takes, overdubbing handclaps later. And that’s all Capitol had to offer until November with the release of The Beatles’ Story, a two-LP spoken-word press release until Beatles ’65 arrived in December, with “I Feel Fine” rounding out the year.
Mikes’ latest book, FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS, is available at amazon.com. Mike’s Amazon page:
https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Michael-Robbins/e/B00CMHSMYA
[Another short post with my Deviantart OC, Lianna. Enjoy.]
DEAR DIARY: It fits perfectly.
The second I graduated from the Space Academy and got my Independent Pilot’s license, I wanted to try it on. Professor Chronitis kept all my parent’s belongings after he took me in, including Mama’s skin suit.
It still smells like her, all jasmine and roses. I want to go to all the places she would’ve gone to. I’m gonna find every weird form of life she never got a chance to. I know it’s kind of weird, but sometimes it’s like she’s still with me, even though she’s been dead over 15 years. I do miss Papa; but I wanna do this for her more.
Mikes’ latest book, FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS, is available at amazon.com. Mike’s Amazon page:
https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Michael-Robbins/e/B00CMHSMYA
I’m afraid when I started posting pix of my OC Lianna Jensen on my Deviantart page, I had no story to go by. Basically I was following the Jim Starlin method of writing, ie, I was making things up as I go. I hadn’t even given her a name until my fourth art set with her. Fortunately by then I also concocted an origin story, and it’s held up pretty nicely since. Enjoy.
I wasn’t actually born there. I was seven years old at the time of her launch. She was a Podship, the first of its kind, with a fully-automated wetwork to monitor our life-signs as we slept between the stars. Her Bangali designers christened her the Naga Sentry.
Her solar sails could harness the currents of Dark Energy between stars. We weren’t scheduled to be awoken for another 100 years, once we reached our destination. She was billed as the Perfect Vessel to colonize the stars, and in a way she was…a perfect nightmare.
Seventeen years into our voyage, our ship hit a solar storm, a corrusation of gamma-ray bursts within Sector 006. Oh, our sleeper-beds were undamaged…we were ray-shielded after all. But the sheer energy billowing through our sails pushed us violently off course, into unknown space. The star-patterns weren’t any that the Navigation banks had been programmed for, so the passengers were awoken too soon in order for them to take charge.
That might explain the subsequent behavior of the passengers and crew. We’d entered a sector where the Multiuniverses converged. The quantum energies flowing between these tiny, overlapping Multiverses began to affect our minds. You might say the adults all got cabin fever…
Even my parents. I-I mean, they adored each other…both as smart as whips…b-but they became like….like…oh God…
By the time the Naga Sentry left that sector and returned to a semblence of normal space, the only ones left alive were the children. The bully boys basically took over, organizing into their own little cliques. They kept some of the Smart Boys on, ‘cause they knew how to work the ship. Some of the smart girls attached themselves to the bully-boys in charge. Anyone who wasn’t attached was called a Loner. And culled.
They might just as well have called us lepers. It wasn’t easy being a Loner. You really had to be ninja. You had to be quick…you had to be sneaky…And you had to know where to hide…
There weren’t many Loners left by the time that lone mining tramp-ship almost collided with us. At least her captain had the decency to call the Space Port Authorities. You see, we couldn’t have known there’d be such advances in sublight engineering in the decades since the Naga Sentry left port. Even the most common ship possessed speeds that had easily overtook our ship and surpassed it. Our mission had become irrelevent. In fact, we’d gone down in history as a legend; the Lost Ship they called us.
We were all pretty much in rags at that point, and didn’t care. Some of the career Terranauts were scared to be around us. Not one man though. He was one of the Observers who came with the rescue ship. I don’t know what Professor Chronitis saw in me, but…he offered me his hand and took me in, and raised me as his own daughter.
Mikes’ latest book, FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS, is available at Amazon.com. Mike’s Amazon page:
https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Michael-Robbins/e/B00CMHSMYA
By Julia Alexander Aug 15, 2017, 5:00pm EDT Marvel’s Stan Lee isn’t shy about speaking out against injustices facing society. Today Lee tweeted a photo of one of his Stan’s Soapbox columns, a monthly piece that ran in Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins news and information section between 1965-2001, from 1968. Lee’s tweet comes just days after […]
Papablues Scrapbook 