ARCHIVES March-June, 2009
May 21, 2009
TAKEN And The Need For
B-Movies
How many mainstream-released theatrical movies clock in at 91 minutes (96 for the extended, unrated version) these days?
Pierre Morel's TAKEN, starring Liam Neeson and Famke Janssen, delivers the adrenalin thrills in 90 odd minutes, a pleasure when the director remembers that movies need not be bloated to two hours or longer. TAKEN is a thrilling roller roaster ride, a well-acted one at that. The goal of the script by Luc Besson (the director of THE FIFTH ELEMENT and writer of THE TRANSPORTER movies) and Robert Mark Kamen (co-writer of THE TRANSPORTER films) is simply to entertain and keep the action and plot moving ahead at breakneck speed.
Liam Neeson, playing father Bryan Mills, is a retired military spy, a self-confessed "preventor" whose job description aligns him with James Bond and Jason Bourne. Even though the slightly long-in-the-tooth Neesom may seem miscast initially, he becomes the perfect actor for the role of father-protector.
The story is a good one with sleazy pulp leanings and simple motivations. But being a fan of genre cinema, TAKEN only reinforces Hollywood's need to continue to make slightly lower-budgeted movies for mass audiences. Mills is retired and plays poker with his former military buddies, who relive the glory days of their past. Mills' ex-wife Lenore (Famke Jansen) married wealth, and their 17 year-old-daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is spoiled rotten but remains the love of Mills' life (he even relocated to be nearer to her). When mother and daughter ask Mills to sign paperwork allowing Kim to tour Europe for the summer, the father states he has problems signing because he knows the horrors of the world (implying those who live in glass houses in wealthy Californian suburbs do not understand the horrors of life outside American borders). However, daddy, of course, gives in and signs. He gives Kim a special cell phone and demands she phone him every night.
Kim and her soon-to-be-doomed girlfriend are in France for mere hours when a cute Albanian boy approaches the girls and invites them to a college party that night, stating he will pick them up at nine. Of course, that night, while Kim is on the phone with Daddy, an invasion occurs where both girls are kidnapped after first being roughed up, Kim remaining on the phone receiving instructions of where to hide, what to scream out (describe the attackers physically, get their voices on the phone, etc.) before she is unable to speak. When the phone grows silent, the intense Mills calmly announces that he will find them and kill them. A voice says, "Good luck" and hangs up. Of course that voice sound print leads the wily Mills directly to him. Checking with his military buddies, the kidnapper is identified as an Albanian who is a member of a gang that kidnaps young Western girls and sells them into a life of drug addiction and prostitution. Mills has a 96-hour window to find his daughter, or she will be lost forever. How very B-film-esque!
The plot immediately comes into sharp focus. From just one poker game we know what we need to know about Mills' background. It only takes two meetings for the audience to understand how much Mills loves his teenaged daughter and how much his ex-wife tries to keep Mills out of her life.
And while the audience expectation would be that it might take 90 minutes for Mills to find the voice on the phone who wished him "good luck," it actually takes minutes in movie time and less than 24 hours in actual time for Mills to trace the Albanian who uses the same tactics to snare new nubile girls for his white slavery connection. Shockingly, as the young man runs onto the freeway and jumps on moving trucks, he is brutally killed when he fails to see a gigantic truck splatter him all over the highway. This crucial sequence leaves the audience bewildered, because Mills' only lead is dead. At this moment, I realized the script would be cleverly intelligent, hopefully filled with more and more surprises along the way.
In the movie Mills is superior in hand-to-hand combat and the use of weapons: pistols, automatic, knives, etc. He is only over-powered one time and he quickly recovers and soon ends up back on top. This is the type of pulp gimmick where Mills jumps on a boat, owned by a sheik and protected by 20 armed guards, and single-handedly overpowers all of them. I can only think back to DR. NO and Bond's cold-blooded killing to see a comparison with Mills' ruthless killings. One time he pursues a hostile down a corridor and shoots him in the back of the head as he chases the man. In another sequence, he tortures a white slaver by wiring him up to the house current and giving him a charge that curls our blood. When the man talks, Mills turns on the current one long and last time, leaving the room for good with the electricity sizzling away. Breaking necks and telling his victims "this won't save you" is his style (juxtaposed to his warmth and love as a father). He even tells his former French buddy, now a cop doing a desk job (but a corrupt cop at that), he will bring down the Eiffel Tower to find his daughter. And the audience knows he means it.
Set pieces include a construction site where makeshift rooms, cubicles separated by thin curtains, house a den of drugged out whores and acts of prostitution. In one room Mills finds the jacket his daughter wore, and Mills goes out of his way to save the over-dosed girl in order to get her to talk and tell him where she got the jacket and where his daughter Kim might be. Other marvelous set pieces include an auction room where scantily clad and drugged out teens are sold to the highest bidder... and in the midst of this hellhole Mills' daughter Kim appears. Before the father can save her (being only 20 feet from her, behind a glassed in partition), he is knocked unconscious. But then Mills awakens, kills a shit-load of hostiles and confronts the nattily dressed business owner who smiles and states, "You must understand this, this was only business, it was not personal," to which Mills barks back, "It was personal to me" before shooting the man in such a way that he will die painfully and slowly. Then Mills exists the elevator leaving the formerly writhing corpse behind.
The movie moves at this kinetic pace from start to finish. In a sense, it is another vigilante movie, another find-my-wife-or-daughter film. But the film has no pretenses. It is, short and simple, an energetic little B thriller, written, acted and directed with poise and talent. After 90 odd minutes, Mills delivers his slightly battered but still cheerful daughter home to her mother and stepfather.
During the 1930s and 1940s B productions ran only an hour when feature films ran 90 to 100 minutes. Today, when movies, sometimes unfortunately in the hands of can't-say-no directors, run two to three hours long, it is wonderful to find a jolting visual romp such as TAKEN that does its business in an hour and a half and demonstrates again that sometimes those smaller, underappreciated B productions might deserve the most praise of all.
May 14, 2009
THE WRESTLER: Fresh Blooms and Rancid Decay
From the late 1950s until about 20 years ago, I've always been a fan of professional wrestling. I was a fan when the current Vince K. McMahon's father (Vince J. McMahon) ran the show with his fledgling World Wide Wrestling Federation, formed as an offshoot from the National Wrestling Alliance (whose champion, the great "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, lost to Bruno Sammartino, in 1963, to form the WWWF). My father was a huge boxing fan, but I loved the theatrics and blood and gore of professional wrestling, and my father Richard took me to the Baltimore Coliseum (where I saw Brute Bernard) and then the newly erected Baltimore Civic Center to see all the Golden Age grapplers of the past: Walter "Killer" Kowalski, Eduard Carpentier, Hans Mortier, Argentino Rocca, Johnny Valentine, Classy Freddie Blassie, Wild "Red" Berry and The Kangaroos, Eddie and Jerry Graham, Bobo Brazil, etc. Even as a child I understood that the matches were most likely orchestrated with a winner already decided, but like great theater, the drama wasn't about who won and who lost, it was about the process, the struggles, the suspense, the sweat, the blood and the passion. Everyone knows Hamlet dies at the end of the Shakespeare play, but it's the process of rising and falling of heroes and villains, the combat becoming larger than life, that symbolizes the spectacle of professional wrestling.
I originally watched wrestling as broadcast twice a week, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, on channel 5 out of Washington, hosted by that great voice Ray Morgan, who announced the matches and interviewed the cast of players between the bouts. But watching the drama play out on the small tube was never enough. Not until I saw heads bashed into ring turnbuckles, mid-air collisions and death defying leaps off the top jump did it become real. One of the best matches I ever saw in person occurred in 1979 or1980, before wrestling nose-dived into the steroid era. Don Leifert and I attended a show at the Capital Arena, in Largo, Maryland, that pitted the always-underappreciated Bob Backlund (we called him "Howdy Doody" because of the wrestler's resemblance to that famous marionette) against the equally underappreciated Iron Sheik. The backward and forward ebb and flow, the magnificently choreographed maneuvers, the manner in which the hero and villain worked the crowd, resulted in a classic match that will not soon be forgotten. Hulk Hogan's superstar status was right around the corner, and Hulk's era initiated punching, stomping and kicking over finesse and actual wrestling moves. Wrestling went downhill rapidly.
Fancy, that the Darren Aronofsky independent film THE WRESTLER deals with the fall of fictional Randy "The Ram" Robinson, whose claim to fame occurred during the decade of the 1980s, just around the time I stopped watching. THE WRESTLER picks up Randy today, as he wrestles for $100 per night in catering halls and high school gyms, following the low-rent circuit around the country. Locked out of his trailer, existing on pain pills and alcohol, taping his bruised body to the best of his ability, Randy "The Ram" is a loner, an absolutely broken human being. Broken both physically and emotionally. The only family he has is a college-aged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) that he practically abandoned during his superstar hey-days, and now, living with another woman, she does not want her father back in her life. Instead, Randy tries to create a relationship with a past-her-prime stripper Cassidy (a courageous Marisa Tomei, who performs often nude from the waist up), who is raising a nine-year-old son on her own. Her policy is never to date customers, and Randy is just that to her, even though the big lunk might be the best person in her desperate life. And they truly understand one another, both having exploited their bodies to make a living, except that Randy truly loves what he does.
Mickey Rourke creates an outstanding, classic performance of the former wrestling star who has fallen, hitting rock bottom. Playing Randy "The Ram," Rouke has greasy half-dyed hair, a bloated broken face and body, the world's ugliest hearing aide, but he possesses the most heartbreaking eyes of humility and compassion. This broken down gladiator is quiet, polite, kind and self-deprecating. Randy never tries to glorify himself or make excuses. He simply tries to live each day as best he can. He admits to Cassidy, I am alone and deserve to be alone, yet he reaches out to his alienated daughter even when she screams in his face to go away. He reaches out to Cassidy, even though she puts him down by calling him nothing but a customer. And he even tries to accept a job as a grocery store deli meat cutter. At first he enjoys his job as he interacts with the customers almost theatrically. But when he gets drunk and misses his one chance to reunite with his daughter, he grows hostile when one of his customers recognizes him, causing Randy to slice his finger in the meat cutter and then, in pain, throw a tantrum for his soon-to-be former boss. We first see Randy enter his deli arena by passing through a plastic-draped door, much in the same manner that Aronofsky films him as he enters the arena from behind a backstage curtain. Even when craving meat, Randy is the consummate performer and entertainer. But at this crucial moment, he realizes he is a wrestler and, heart bypass or not, that's the only life for him. In the ring is the only time he feels both alive and worthwhile.
The bargain-basement arena matches are brutal, involving Randy cutting his forehead open using razor blades to bleed for the audience, to work up their frenzy. He even allows his opponent to use a staple gun to rip metal into his chest and shoulders (his opponent telling him the stapes do not hurt much going in, it's the ripping them out after the match that causes the most pain). Wearing a long metal pendant around his neck that hangs down into the crease in his chest where the bypass scars stand out, Randy announces to his fans that they are his family, and that he will wrestle until they tell him to stop. By film's end Cassidy is ready to allow Randy to enter her social sphere, but though very much interested in pursuing that relationship, Randy is more focused on resuming his career, to try to live his life with what dignity and strength he has remaining.
The movie features a tour-de-force performance by Rourke and is perhaps the cinematic performance of the year, or perhaps even the decade (Rouke well deserved his Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor; the Oscars simply are not relevant anymore and ignored both his performance and the movie), most definitely the defining performance of Rourke's career. His is a performance that is painful to watch, yet the man's humanity is always present. When he wrestles the up-and-coming or fallen-from-grace performers of the past, Randy is always quick to take direction, to make the other guy look better, and always has something nice to say to his peers, some words of encouragement, even as he suffers intense pain. Randy is beloved and respected, and he has time to entertain a groupie in a run-down arena bathroom. In spite of the life Randy has created, the audience pulls for the broken down warrior and our hearts bleed for him. Life can be cruel and unkind, but there's dignity to be found even living in the gutters of the city's poverty row.
As a child and teen growing up, watching those professional wrestlers at the Civic Center, we never realized that after the fame and glory passed, that life continued, that bills had to be paid, money had to be earned, and that the glory days were rather short. Most likely too many real-life Randy's exist, performing menial jobs to stay afloat.
THE WRESTLER is an excellent movie, perhaps not a great one, but Mickey Rourke's performance as our broken down tragic hero Randy "The Ram" Robinson is one for the ages.
April 10, 2009
HORROR OF DRACULA and the Historic Senator Theatre
The Historic Senator Theatre is beloved by movie lovers in Baltimore and beyond. It was once one of several crown jewels of the suburban network of neighborhood theaters existing in Baltimore. Back in the day, we had the first-run palaces in downtown Baltimore, but for second runs, movies jumped to the neighborhood theaters (in the city and suburban areas). Now all the old Baltimore theaters are gone, except the Hippodrome, a movie theater restored and reopened as a thespic showcase. The Senator, now an independent theater, is owned and operated by Tom Kiefaber, a man who ran the theater into the ground (some called him business naïve, others arrogant and bull-headed). Defaulting on bank loans, burning up money provided by emergency city government bail outs and begging for private contributions from movie lovers who frequented the Senator, Kiefaber was at his wit's ends attempting to convert the theater into an non-profit community arts center, even offering to step down as the day-to-day operator. But the bank, also in trouble, called in his loan and, unless the city government intervenes, the historic theater will be auctioned off April 20, hopefully to remain a movie theater and not a parking garage or shopping center. But no such guarantee exists at the moment.
Tom Kiefaber, usually dressed nattily in sports jackets and suits, appeared last weekend at the theater in casual jacket and tee shirt, looking pretty despondent, as he empted out the back offices at the theater and was selling posters for $20 a pop, the metal marquee letters for $10 a letter and all sorts of photographs and Senator memorabilia before the axe falls. His home, collateral for numerous loans, is also in danger of being auctioned from under him as well.
And one local private collector wanted the theater to go out with a bang, so he offered to allow the theater to show his personal 35mm prints of classic movies, so Kiefaber could charge a mere $5 a ticket (half the usual ticket price). For three days last weekend the Senator showed what they billed as an IB Technicolor print of Hammer's classic HORROR OF DRACULA. Like the theater, the Technicolor print of HORROR OF DRACULA was well worn. The once vibrant Tech hues succumbed to the bruised print and lost much of its brilliant luster. Supposedly Tech prints do not fade, and this print had not turned red by a long-shot, but I once owned a 16mm Technicolor print of the same film and my 16mm print boosted deeper saturation and hues long gone from the screened 35mm print. Yes, it was wonderful to see the classic Hammer projected on a huge screen in an ornate theater, but even the projectionist could not keep the movie from losing its framing and entire heads were cut off for minutes (making the botched mastering of the DVD of HORROR OF DRACULA appear to be perfect by comparison) until friend Gus Russo (famed investigative reporter and musical composer for BASKET CASE and BRAIN DAMAGE) walked back to tell the staff of the problem. The screechy soundtrack accentuated the treble, negating the deep bass, and the volume was much too high.
But when will I ever have the chance to see my favorite horror film projected large and viewed in the company of a movie audience (composed of about 50 to 70 people in a theater that seats over 900). It was a bittersweet experience composed of equal parts enthusiastic, exaltation and nostalgia and equal parts sadness, anger, regret, and the sense that an era of movie showmanship too was fading away. Remember, the same print was screened for members of FANEX 8 at the Senator Theatre during our Hammer-themed show, but I could not attend because I was wheelchair bound, having ruptured my patella tendon the Thursday before the weekend show.
Even though Sue worked a full day last summer coming up with creative ideas to make money for the then troubled Senator Theatre (some involved working with Midnight Marquee, others did not), Kiefaber blew all of the ideas away saying, brusquely, "Sue, none of these ideas will make the millions of dollars I need!" In spite of repeatedly rejecting our ideas and suggestions to help the Senator survive, and in spite of Kiefaber booking a special Sunday night show at his theater selling tickets on the strength of "hosting" Robert Wise as special guest (a guest that FANEX paid for totally, never an offer from Kiefaber to chip in and help pay expenses, even booking the special Senator attraction without telling Sue or me, knowing the FANEX dates), we only wish the absolute best for the Historic Senator Theatre. But it has become clear to most that if the theater is to survive as a movie theater, it is time for Kiefaber to move aside and allow someone to operate the theater as a for-profit business, someone creative enough to think outside the box and tap into the theater's full creative potential.
The British Film Institute restored HORROR OF DRACULA to perfection a year ago. However, the print of HORROR OF DRACULA we watched last weekend was faded, not very colorful, a shadow of its former vibrancy. I would love to see that restored BFI print in an equally renovated Senator Theatre, where the treasures of the cinematic past become the glory of the present-day movie palace. That's a dream that any lover of classic movies can wrap him or herself around!
March 29, 2009
Warner Bros. Continues to Bleed the Collector
Everyone knows that Warner Bros. remains the principle studio releasing classic movies to the home video market, usually re-mastered and restored as close to perfection as possible. With their affordable box sets and single disc releases, why should we now be complaining?
Well, it all started with Warner's DVD and Blu-ray box set of CASABLANCA: THE ULTIMATE COLLECTOR'S EDITION. The list price for Blu-ray is $65 and it sells on Amazon.com for $42. Without exception the film has never looked nor sounded better and the Blu-ray mastering is state-of-the-art. The Ultimate Collection includes a second disc of extras, as well as a 48-page book, 10 one-sheet reproduction cards, a passport holder and luggage tag and archival correspondence. But I for one discard such elaborate packaging and store my DVDs and Blu-ray discs in leather binders, since I am only interested in the movies, not the bells and whistles.
What I want is to be able to purchase CASABLANCA in Blu-ray for an affordable $26 or so, street price. Let's face it, many collectors have already purchased CASABLANCA on DVD twice so far and most are willing to upgrade to Blu-ray, but at an affordable price. Yes, such Ultimate Collector's Editions should be available, but also a standard release without the extras should also be available. I just am not willing to spend $42 for a classic release that I bought on DVD for around $20. I do not need nor desire the books, repro one-sheet cards, luggage tags. Just give me the movie!
Now things are getting worse.
Warner Bros. just announced Ultimate Collector's Editions, over-stuffed box sets again, of two classics, GONE WITH THE WIND and THE WIZARD OF OZ. Will the list prices be $65? Afraid not! Perhaps CASABLANCA sold too well. These two new classic releases, coming toward the end of the year, will list price for $85 each and sell on Amazon.com, at the moment, for $60. No extras have been announced yet, but once again, why can't fans purchase the movie in a simple package for less than $30? Do I want to spend $60 apiece for a Blu-ray copy of both classics? No, I am not willing to pay that amount. It is simply too much to ask for a person only interested in the movie itself. Studios are trying to make Blu-ray releases assessable to the mainstream collector, and these ultra-expensive collector's editions in tough economic times are only keeping Blu-ray a specialty niche market product. Not good!
Warner Bros. must be praised and thanked for its dedication to releasing restored versions of classic movies, so we must not lose sight of this fact. But Warner Bros. must understand that selling to collectors is one thing, selling to movie buffs is another thing. How many versions of GONE WITH THE WIND and THE WIZARD OF OZ have we already purchased? And now, to spend about $60 (the price might drop by $5 or so by actual release time) for the same movie, albeit a re-mastered one in Blu-ray perfection, is tempting, but I for one am not biting. Warner Bros. is allowed to make a tidy profit, and I do not begrudge them that. But Warner Bros. must also understand that the proverbial cash cow has been milked dry already and that movie fans will not tolerate mind-numbing prices for a movie they already own in multiple editions.
So come now Warner Bros., make two editions available in Blu-ray, one for the Ultimate Collector and one for the movie fan who only wants to watch the movie. The studio will make a killing from both editions and people will be happier since they now have a choice of whether they wish to purchase memorabilia they may or may not care about.
May 29, 2009
Warner Bros Continues to Serve the Needs of the Movie Fan
Just as soon as we go and criticize Warner Bros. for bilking the movie fan, they open their video-on-demand Warner Archive Collection, a series of around 150 Warner Bros. titles not currently available (legally, that is) on DVD. Borrowing the idea of Amazon.com's Book Surge, that prints books only after orders have been placed (for one copy or 1,000), now the Warner Archive Collection has opened for those movie collectors to purchase DVDs made to order from its ever-expanding film library. The cost of each movie is $19.95 plus $4.95 for Ground Shipping (add a dollar for each additional movie). However, for the time being, the shipping cost has been waived as long as the total order is shipped to one home address. Each movie takes approximately seven business days to produce and be shipped (in order words, made to order, video on demand) and comes packaged in a typical DVD case with full color artwork. Yes, these movies are burned and not replicated/mastered, but Warner Bros. boosts that its upgraded DVD-Rs are superior to home burned DVDs and they stand behind and guarantee their product will play, without fault, on any DVD player.
The Warner Archive Collection opened featuring approximately 150 titles, but the collection is predicted to swell to over 300 titles by the end of the year. In other words, Warner Bros. owns so many movies that will never become earn mass market appeal and be released in the conventional manner. Here, lesser-anticipated titles (such as the two I just purchased--ON BORROWED TIME and I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI) can now be purchased from the Archive Collection. Of course this means that most, if not all, will ever be released in the more traditional way, but it still opens the door to purchase lesser-desired titles that may well sell in the hundreds rather than in the thousands. The collection includes silent titles as well as movies from the 1960s and beyond. Of course plenty of movies from the classic 1930s, 1940s and 1950s are available, many titles of which I do not recognize, but I plan to research them on the Internet Movie Database. The Archive Collection consists of rare titles that are generally not classics, but instead good, sometimes flawed, titles that people remember fondly but haven't been able to see for decades. These are not the pick of the litter but are worthy nonetheless.
People can also vote for four new titles every month that they wish to add to the Archive Collection, and new titles will be added monthly, most likely 20 new titles per month.
Therefore, I recommend supporting such an endeavor. The Warner Archive Collection will only continue if it is profitable, and even if these initial 150 titles do not spark any lightning, perhaps purchasing a title or two today might open up the opportunity for even more exciting titles to become available in the upcoming months.
Warner Bros., bless their little hearts. We can't always live with them financially, but we can't live without them either!
March 15, 2009
The iPod--The Music of a Lifetime In The Palm of Your Hand!
For years and years I held to the philosophy that music needed to be on a vinyl disc or CD, something tangible I could hold in my hands, something that had cover art and perhaps a lyric sheet, besides assorted photos and production credits. I held out longer than most in the iPod era, even though CD sales and brick-and-mortar record stores were closing left and right. Just as the CD drove the stake through the heart of the long player, MP3 digital downloads killed the CD.
About two to three years ago, for a whim, I purchased my first iPod, an 8 gig Nano. I digitally transferred the better songs from my extensive CD collection to iTunes. I never went as far as to digitize my vinyl collection, because of the time and the less-than-spectacular sound quality. It would have been cheaper to simply repurchase those old chestnuts as downloads, the ones that are available digitally.
But then I decided, with the advent of then new year 2008, to go exclusively digital download and abandon the shiny CD (which, according to Sue, were overtaking the house). Besides having the best of my CD collection on the Nano, I would now purchase albums (not single songs as most of the kids are doing) in digital format and burn them to CD for the car. I found myself over the past decade listening less and less to music on the home theater sound system, which even included an SACD DVD player. I began to listen mostly to music driving to and from work, on the car stereo. Certainly, MP3 sound could compete with that.
Well, by the end of 2008, my Nano was full. What to do? Well, I invested in the largest iPod I could purchase, the Classic, which boosted 120 gig (the larger 160 gig model was discontinued). Compared to my 8 gig Nano, the Classic was a powerhouse juke box.
Now I could go back and digitize entire albums from my collection, not just a select five-or-six best songs. I could now purchase digital albums I only had on vinyl (such as Rolling Stones classics). I found myself purchasing rock classics that I somehow missed. I even decided to explore late fifties jazz, by downloading the classics by Coltrane, Davis and others. And while I paid generally $10-$13 for CD's, I find myself paying generally $9 for digital downloads with many titles for sale from $2-$5 (thank you Amazon.com MP3 digital music store and your MP3 Daily Deal).
And of course I never used the cheap ear buds that came free with each iPod. I researched and purchased an in-ear top-of-the-line model from Shure, and I must say, the in-ear sound is perfect, instruments darting across the soundscape of my head, left and right channel crisscrossing. For all the detractors, I feel the iPod sound is fantastic, vibrant and intense. Of course at age 58 my hearing is not as good as it once was, so perhaps some subtleties of sound are lost. But to my ears, the sound is involving, bright and magical.
Just think, the music of a lifetime, and I can hold the iPod in the palm of my hand. With the flick of a thumb or finger, I can listen to "My Favorite Things" by Coltrane, "Salt of the Earth" by the Rolling Stones, wonderful albums released within the past year or so by Fleet Foxes, Alejandro Escovedo, Bob Dylan, Okkervil River, Paul Westerberg, The Hold Steady, Lucinda Williams, Portishead and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I can enjoy classics by Buddy Holly, the Doors, Brian Wilson with or without the Beach Boys, Iggy and the Stooges, The New York Dolls, Mott the Hoople, Ramones. All a momentary click away. Wow, music from the 1960s now merges with music of now and classics from the distant past (anyone for Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music ?). And there's no storage problems, no hunting for that one magical album which is never to be found until the urge to play it has passed. It's all here, all in one compact Apple storage device.
How cool! All this music, the tunes that fill and enrich my life, and my iPod Classic is only one-fifth full. Hopefully in my musical lifetime there will be plenty of new music to enjoy and plenty of time to enjoy it over and over again. Thank you, iPod Classic! Sometimes "new-school" has its advantages!
Now if the kids would only take out their ear buds and turn off the iPods in my classroom! I'm pretty "old-school" about that!!!
