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Todd Mason

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Posts posted by Todd Mason

  1. Posted

    Sadly, Stirling Silliphant isn't available for interview: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0798103/ ...he was always kind of uneven in his career, as a glance down that list will suggest. And don't forget that IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT the film is based on the excellent novel by John Ball, and some of Silliphant's changes (which annoyed Ball, surprise) were toward the dull-witted (such as making San Francisco detective Virgil Tibbs a Philly detective at a time when Philly cops were under well-known Non-friend of African-Americans, and petty points of procedure/law, Frank Rizzo, Sr. (The tv series, of course, was just a joke from jump.) Ball set his second Tibbs novel in a nudist colony, to leave it relatively unfilmable...

  4. Posted

    KV's "actual" singing voice is pretty damned great, actually. Interesting that that hasn't come up more in the past.

     

    Some episodes of the first season of AMERICAN IN PRIMETIME, particularly the sf episode (which tried to treat STAR TREK and LOST IN SPACE as congruent series...there was a lot that was goofy about the original ST, but...no.), are pretty lazy...

     

    Death, the band, didn't spring from nowhere, as good as they could be...consider such Detroit progenitors as the Detroit Wheels, ? and the Mysterians, and most saliently, along with the likes of Love and the JH Experience from elsewhere, the MC5...white boys who covered Sun Ra Arkestra free jazz in a rock context and otherwise were also playing speed-metal and protopunk, in 1968 vs. Death in '74 (and I have to wonder if Bad Brains were Death fans, perhaps not too long before the Brains gave up on being a jazz-rock fusion band)...

  6. Posted

    An epithet is offensive no matter who uses it...if they're using it as an insult. Methodists, for example, were able to repurpose the insult that word originally was, and now it isn't an insult...but it could still be meant to be one. (Quakers have done similarly, if to a lesser degree.) I don't think others' use of an insult is necessarily to further insult the originally attacked party. And, of course, there have been all sorts of epithets tossed around...and all kinds of oppression, to varying degrees...in the world we live in when not typing into a grey window. My "redskin" ancestors managed to escape some of the worst of it...and the paler ones did, too. Others have not been so lucky.

     

    All told, it's interesting that the not well-tempered critique of the frequently shallow (and self-satisfied...though occasionally insightful, depending on guest) other podcast has inspired so much correspondence, chestpounding and otherwise...when the unlamented trouble here has been mispronouncing "bonobos" and calling these fine apes "monkeys"....

  10. Posted

    Rimbaud was actually pronounced "Rambo" (roughly, in that Gallic way). That's why David Morell named the moody (to say the least) character in FIRST BLOOD the novel "Rambo," in fact.

     

    It's easier to write a bad poem than a bad joke, perhaps (many are both, some intentionally)...but harder to write an acceptable poem or better than a comparable joke...

  14. Posted

    Christopher Priest, who wrote the novel THE PRESTIGE (adapted for the film) actually made up the term "the prestige"...not actually in use beforehand. Or so he reports, and I have no reason to doubt him.

     

    I haven't looked at KABUKI since early on in its run (third or fourth issue...)...I remember the utter visual panache, certainly...good show.

  16. Posted

    Hmm. Well, KV is always forthright about her openness to fringy stuff...my major Pecksniff comment on this one would be to note that orangutans and chimps aren't monkeys. They're Apes, like us...which is why they resent us, when they do, so thoroughly. Not that the monkeys don't resent us, when they do, as well (monkeys are smart enough to have their own agendas). (And those other primates, lemurs, supposedly can't be trusted not to spread their excrement around...whatever metaphor for foul-tempered commenters one might wish to draw from that, is up to you.)

  18. Posted

    Leaving aside all the jazz hatred (and all the other non-rock that employs saxes): The Sonics: "Have Love, Will Travel". Though, yes, X-Ray Spex were fun (even if they didn't quite Get It). (Then again, the LA anthem isn't still "New York's OK [if You Like Saxophones]"?

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20S_kwNb4rg

    <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/20S_kwNb4rg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    Meanwhile, a point of clarification...assuming the Jacobs-wooing is still an option...do they have to be US dollars? (And surely mixing Monopoly and Life money is OK? I'm sure they burn more readily...and are perfect for entertaining CBB babies, or for rolling paper for UCB babies as per Mr. Marshall...)

  21. Posted

    Mr. Mike in MISTER MIKE'S MONDO VIDEO wasn't the MR. BILL guy, but the more sophisticated (and even more nihilistic) Michael O'Donoghue...who did things such as the comix PHOEBE ZEITGEIST for EVERGREEN REVIEW before doing work with and for NATIONAL LAMPOON and SNL in the early years. O'Donoghue was responsible for the first SNL sketch ever, with MO'D "teaching" John Belushi English with phrases about putting his eyes out with spikes...M'OD's character has a heart attack and collapses, and Belushi's isn't certain what to do, so continues to imitate his tutor. I think they were the first two SNL on-air talent actually to die, as well...("Mr. Hands" didn't have that good a time of it later on, either...)

  22. Posted

    The Parker novels were published as by "Richard Stark"...which was the pseudonym of Donald Westlake, who might be best remembered for writing the novel THE HOT ROCK (which was adapted for the Robert Redford film)(the character Dortmunder Redford played was a sort of less-insane, and much unluckier, version of Parker), adapting the novel for the film THE GRIFTERS, and writing the script for the great, original film THE STEPFATHER...he was a great writer.

  23. Posted

    Well...the wave of feminism that grew even stronger in the early 1970s definitely had already begun to express itself in the 1960s, in the wake of Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (and its bestselling status), the Civil Rights Movement, the varying degrees of counterculture, the AntiWar movement, the sexual revolution (to its varying degrees of existence)--and of course the amount of unconscious and not so much sexism in each of these movements...and the emerging lesbian as well gay male rights movements, with the Daughters of Bilitis standing side by side with the Matachine Society...

  24. Posted

    The fact-check no one needs: PHC is no longer syndicated by PRI (which was formed, in large part, to syndicate PHC, since Keillor seems to have had a problem with NPR going back some decades)...PHC has moved along to American Public Media...APM...meanwhile, PRI seems to be losing/dumping every show they have except for THIS AMERICAN LIFE (well, keeping a few others, too), with those that didn't go to APM mostly seeming to migrate to PRX, the Public Radio Exchange...dunno why, yet.

  25. Posted

    Cinematic suiting: Well, The Man in the White Suit. And Patrick McGoohan in nearly anything he did.

     

    A very promising start, even grand-ois(e) in its pleasantry. I don't know how many episodes beyond two can be spun out of this iteration (how much, indeed, did you dislike Abe Vigoda's sitcom Fish and The Day the Fish Came Out?), but the interaction between the three was good fun, even for one, such as myself, who found Jaws pleasant enough (and no more) upon seeing it on first run, and has never liked a Spielberg film before or since even that much...so maybe it is the capstone to his plastic career. Not a huge Peter Benchley fan, either, but his father wasn't too shabby a novelist, and his grandfather's work was a passion of my youth...more the prose than the films, but the RB film appearances were often good, too...

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