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September 29, 2004
I've put a random selection of some of the things I've written over the past few years on the menu at left. Note that I've included about 15 pages of an unfinished home-recording book that I started writing. It's doubtful that I'll be able to finish it now that I'm occupied with law school, but I think the book--tentatively titled The Home Mixing Handbook--has some helpful hints for you aspiring Phil Spector/Brian Wilson types.
September 28, 2004 
Here's a plug for Aero, Jean Michel Jarre's latest album. Jarre is the French electronic music wunderkind who wrote and produced two of the seventies' most stunning albums, Oxygene and Equinoxe. Far from the "new age" category in which he finds himself stuck in U.S. record stores, Jarre has been making great music for 30 years, and Aero is a best-of that actually samples the source sounds of his original tracks and re-performs them on new equipment. The new tracks are cool too. Also included is a DVD with a 5.1 mix of the whole album in Dolby Digital and DTS. You can hear the famous ostinato from "Equinoxe 4" spin around the room. All artists should do this... September 26, 2004  This post is about Star Trek. Specifically, it's about something I never thought I'd see: the legendary deleted scenes from Generations that have now been exhumed by Paramount for the Special Edition DVD. When the movie came out in 1994, there was a great deal of anticipation in the fan base for the historic pairing of Kirk and Picard. I remember getting fairly worked up about it myself, waiting in line at the Eric Pacific 4 in Lancaster, Pa., for about 4 hours to see this thing. Of course, the movie was a fairly big letdown. Visually, The Next Generation didn't translate very well to the big screen, and the creative powers behind it were compeltely unaware of how to make a full-length feature of any sort of scope. What we got were some marauding Klingons, some bad jokes, and a plot that has a lot of incoherent elements that seem fairly underwhelming in retrospect. Sadly, we also have Shatner, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig from the original show in an embarrassing prologue that's bad enough in the finished film. The message I have after watching the deleted scenes is that it could have been far worse. The movie was originally supposed to begin with an "orbital skydiving" sequence...  Doohan and Koenig are waiting around in a field somewhere--it looks like Palmdale to me--when Shatner's stunt double lands on the ground and scampers around, rather hilariously. Koenig and Doohan are in hot pursuit. Cut to Shatner pulling off his helmet and delivering some horribly written dialogue about how much he loves to skydive from satellites. This sequence was shot and cut, but, as Rick Berman helpfully explains on the DVD, "it didn't work for any of us." Also known as, "We're incomptent and the scene sucked in every possible way."  (As an interesting side note: The existence of this sequence was denied by Paramount right before the movie came out. It was in a leaked copy of the script that was all over the BBS and nascent Internet scene; there was lots of talk about it. Paramount eventually admitted that it did exist when someone pointed out that they themselves had released a promo photo of it several months before.)  It's embarrassing and terrible to think that Star Trek came to this (or this), which is far worse than anything in the much-maligned Trek V. The DVD also brings us the original ending to Generations, which featured Captain Kirk turning his back on Malcolm McDowell and getting shot. Not only was it ill-conceived, the performance from Shatner is ridiculous; did they look at the expression on his face on the set?  It looks more like a bad hangover than the death of one of the most famous characters in pop culture.  The ending was re-shot at great expense, as Berman explains, to give it "more punch." Also because test audiences ran gagging from the theater. I have to give it to them that the re-shot ending is probably a 3/10, whereas the original one is maybe a 2/10. Of course, the death of Trek is now history. I'd give Generations a lot of credit in knocking the franchise down several notches, as it confirmed everyone's worst fears; that the new people in charge didn't really know what they were doing. Of course, with the debut of Voyager about 11 months away, we were about to find out exactly how bad it could get. September 22, 2004 September 12, 2004
I've finished setting up a smaller version of the Ganymede studio here in my (tiny) New York apartment ... I'm currently working on a cover of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" for an upcoming Cleopatra Records U2 cover album, as well as putting the finishing touches on "Lover Come Back to Me" for the forthcoming Dead or Alive cover album being spearheaded by the ESH boys.
September 08, 2004
Trusty Bay area rock band Ariel, the members of which I'm proud to call friends, have just released "The Wartime President Song," a hot track speaking the truth that's straight outta Alameda.
September 01, 2004 |
