Past, Present, Future
May. 4th, 2020 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThe other night, we went back to Da Fifteez with a 1974 film I'd been waiting on Netflix to send us for some time. I never saw it when it came out, but the audio of this commercial also aired on NYC FM radio at the time, and it's still burned into my brain:
That is indeed Henry Winkler pre-Fonz, and Sylvester Stallone pre-Rocky. The top-billed actor, though, was a guy named Perry King, who has had as long if not as famed a career, mostly in television. The cinematography was quite raw, and left a bit to the imagination to preserve that "raaaated-PEEE-GEEEEE!" classification, but we enjoyed the trip back. We followed that with a film set even earlier in the 50s, though filmed a decade later: Clue, the campy and now-culty adaptation of the board game with Tim Curry leading a mostly A-list cast and taking us through all three of the separate endings sent to theaters in the 80s. I remember it coming out, and found the whole A-B-C ending concept too gimmicky to ever check out any of them. This piece recounts the weird path this movie took to get made and then take on a life of its own in the years following it.
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Over the weekend, we kept mostly to the here and now. Eleanor did a lot of gardening, while I kept mostly to the inside things as well as the symbolic move of taking our storm door panels out (just in time for them to predict snow by the end of the week). We also finally got word that our stimulus payment is scheduled for deposit on Wednesday, which will keep us going, with actual work continuing, through at least most of this month. And I spent more than a few minutes reading, and either refuting or just being pissed about, any number of things about COVIDiots either protesting their constitutional right to get their nails done or spouting misinformation about the current pandemic.
Sunday began with another new park exploration- actually a combination of Park School, Fetto Park, and Parkledge Drive, all very close to my office but with plenty of nature in and around them.
Park School's a preppy joint I pass every day and have visited its grounds a few times during public events, but this was our first actual trespass into the trails and trees behind it:
This is what they get during recess. We had monkey bars over a concete pit.
Near that, kids from one of their graduating classes designed a Labyrinth. You don't see Pepper there, because she was no doubt looking for the Bog of Eternal Stench.
THERE she is, seeing her shadow. I guess that means six more weeks of social distancing....
And there's Ursula, sticking her kisser into some sort of dead thing. (She gobbled one up on the library lawn on our way back to the cars.)
From there, we took the sidewalk to the next stop:
The park's little more than the size of a small road, because that's what it was originally planned as- a cut-through from the main road to the subdivision housing Emily's elementary school (Fetto being the adjacent landowner who sold the strip to the town). It took years after abandoning the road idea to turn it into what it now is, and while it's really not that much, it has plenty of nice sights-
- and, as far as the dogs are concerned, smells. We wound up putting two miles under our leashes by the time we walked through the Smallwood neighborhood, along Main and back to Harlem where we began.
----
Finally, the weekend ended with us getting about halfway through a trip into the Not Too Distant Future: Upload is a new series on Amazon Prime about a tech-driven afterlife. It seemed to share a vision with The Good Place, as it probably should because their respective showrunners both come out of the coaching tree created by The Office. The older series, though, was for network television, and was generally sillier and less pointed in its humor. It also had established stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson anchoring it. Upload brings a cast of relative newcomers- the standout exception being William B. Davis, X-Files' long-running "Cancer Man"- and, without the FCC censors to deal with, a greater opportunity to explore and expletive. Many of those bombs come out of the mouth of babe who we know to be the son of longtime blogger friendstresskitten; it briefly appeared he was going to be aged out of the role, but that now appears not to be the case halfway through.
That is indeed Henry Winkler pre-Fonz, and Sylvester Stallone pre-Rocky. The top-billed actor, though, was a guy named Perry King, who has had as long if not as famed a career, mostly in television. The cinematography was quite raw, and left a bit to the imagination to preserve that "raaaated-PEEE-GEEEEE!" classification, but we enjoyed the trip back. We followed that with a film set even earlier in the 50s, though filmed a decade later: Clue, the campy and now-culty adaptation of the board game with Tim Curry leading a mostly A-list cast and taking us through all three of the separate endings sent to theaters in the 80s. I remember it coming out, and found the whole A-B-C ending concept too gimmicky to ever check out any of them. This piece recounts the weird path this movie took to get made and then take on a life of its own in the years following it.
----
Over the weekend, we kept mostly to the here and now. Eleanor did a lot of gardening, while I kept mostly to the inside things as well as the symbolic move of taking our storm door panels out (just in time for them to predict snow by the end of the week). We also finally got word that our stimulus payment is scheduled for deposit on Wednesday, which will keep us going, with actual work continuing, through at least most of this month. And I spent more than a few minutes reading, and either refuting or just being pissed about, any number of things about COVIDiots either protesting their constitutional right to get their nails done or spouting misinformation about the current pandemic.
Sunday began with another new park exploration- actually a combination of Park School, Fetto Park, and Parkledge Drive, all very close to my office but with plenty of nature in and around them.
Park School's a preppy joint I pass every day and have visited its grounds a few times during public events, but this was our first actual trespass into the trails and trees behind it:
This is what they get during recess. We had monkey bars over a concete pit.
Near that, kids from one of their graduating classes designed a Labyrinth. You don't see Pepper there, because she was no doubt looking for the Bog of Eternal Stench.
THERE she is, seeing her shadow. I guess that means six more weeks of social distancing....
And there's Ursula, sticking her kisser into some sort of dead thing. (She gobbled one up on the library lawn on our way back to the cars.)
From there, we took the sidewalk to the next stop:
The park's little more than the size of a small road, because that's what it was originally planned as- a cut-through from the main road to the subdivision housing Emily's elementary school (Fetto being the adjacent landowner who sold the strip to the town). It took years after abandoning the road idea to turn it into what it now is, and while it's really not that much, it has plenty of nice sights-
- and, as far as the dogs are concerned, smells. We wound up putting two miles under our leashes by the time we walked through the Smallwood neighborhood, along Main and back to Harlem where we began.
----
Finally, the weekend ended with us getting about halfway through a trip into the Not Too Distant Future: Upload is a new series on Amazon Prime about a tech-driven afterlife. It seemed to share a vision with The Good Place, as it probably should because their respective showrunners both come out of the coaching tree created by The Office. The older series, though, was for network television, and was generally sillier and less pointed in its humor. It also had established stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson anchoring it. Upload brings a cast of relative newcomers- the standout exception being William B. Davis, X-Files' long-running "Cancer Man"- and, without the FCC censors to deal with, a greater opportunity to explore and expletive. Many of those bombs come out of the mouth of babe who we know to be the son of longtime blogger friend
stresskitten; it briefly appeared he was going to be aged out of the role, but that now appears not to be the case halfway through. So far my favorite exchange in Upload: Nora takes Nathan slumming in the 2G level, the cheap seats of the afterlife. He thumbs through a mostly blank book.
Nathan: "What's this? It's only the first five pages."
Nora: "Yup, the free sample. If they want to read the whole book, they have to pay extra."
CUT TO kid reading "Harry Potter and the Abbreviated Adventure."
Nathan, trying to reassure him: "Oh, hey, I love Harry Potter. All the magic's so cool!"
Kid: "There's magic in Harry Potter?"
Please deposit $2.99 as an in-app purchase to find out;)
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Which gets us to today, our annual recognition of Star Wars Day. Seemingly future, but actually a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, they had their own issues with social distancing: