Last Thursday night after work, Amy and I launched our anniversary getaway trip to Whitewater, Wisconsin. It was a relatively short trip across the border and we arrived at our destination, the Hamilton House, in under two hours. The house is within walking distanct of the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater and that evening we fell asleep to the shrieks of drunken revelry that were spilling from the three fraternity houses that surround the Hamilton. The next day, we were informed by Jim, one of our hosts, that the branch university is a suitcase college, meaning the students party on Thursday night and then retreat to Mommy and Daddy's residence for the remainder of the weekend. Being a graduate of Slippery Rock University, I was all too familiar with this phenomenon.
As it turns out, the house's history is inextricably tied to the university. It has apparently been many things since its construction including office space, a doll museum, and of course, a private residence. But it seems that the Hamilton House most often filled the role of fraternity/sorority house just as its present neighbors for a healthy (perhaps more apt, unhealthy) portion of its existence. Apparently the house's most famous ties are to one John Belushi who was a student at the university for a very short period of time before dropping out and returning to Chicago to persue a career as a drug-addled actor. According to the story, as told to us by Kathleen the hostess, after dropping out of school, John and friends would return to the house on weekends to party due to the drinking age, which remained at a spry 18 in Wisconsin. It was events from those parties that were extracted for some of the memorable scenes in the film Animal House, perhaps most notably the motorcycle being driven up the stairs. However, in real life, the fraternity's charter was revoked and the brotherhood dissolved.
Despite the raucous history of the house, Amy and I lived a very relaxing four days in warmth and comfort. We did a lot of reading. We played lots of board games and other parlor games including chess, checkers, chinese checkers, Othello, mancala, Boggle, Scrabble, and Monopoly. After reading the list of games, its hard to imagine having time for much else, but we made plenty of time for getting out and about as well. We visited the surrounding area including Fort Atkinson and Lake Geneva on two different days, stopping in all kinds of shops to peruse their wares, but of course, not buying anything at all.
It was quite difficult to return to our regular lives after those four days, but back we are with only our expectations for next year to hold. It's been six very good years and I am personally looking forward to number seven very much.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Dead Aardvark
Amy and I got together with Jordan and Jeanne Sunday night for dinner and a movie. We went to a small Italian restaurant called Martino's and then retired to their basement which is quite literally a small movie theater. Jordan has a digital projector mounted from the ceiling that projects its image onto the screen. I'm not sure of the exact dimensions of the screen, but it has an aspect ratio similar in appearance to typical 16:9 televisions. The main differences, of course, are that it's a screen and it covers an entire wall. I was unsure what Amy's reaction to something like that would be and was pleased to discover that she was duly impressed. I am one step closer to my goal! Anyway, we watched Hero. It was, as usual, visually stunning and the combat sequences were amazing. Martial arts movies just plain rule.
In the frustrating news department, I did a quick check to see if there were any updated drivers for my professional audio card and found that the company, Aardvark Audio, has gone out of business. My first reaction is to sell the card, get what I can for it, and buy something that is still being manufactured. I haven't experienced a second reaction yet. I might just be stuck with it, which is fine unless I need support. I've also heard rumors that they only went under temporarily until some legal issues are sorted out, but I'm not holding my breath.
Currently listening to: Van Halen, I'll Wait
In the frustrating news department, I did a quick check to see if there were any updated drivers for my professional audio card and found that the company, Aardvark Audio, has gone out of business. My first reaction is to sell the card, get what I can for it, and buy something that is still being manufactured. I haven't experienced a second reaction yet. I might just be stuck with it, which is fine unless I need support. I've also heard rumors that they only went under temporarily until some legal issues are sorted out, but I'm not holding my breath.
Currently listening to: Van Halen, I'll Wait
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Rotating Homage
If you actually made it to the end of my B-Fest recap, you probably saw a bit about the rotating room in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. When I saw the scene in the movie, I muttered some poor joke under my breath about A Nightmare on Elm Street which famously uses a rotating room in Freddy's first kill scene. As it turns out, I read later that the rotating room in Breakin' 2 is the exact same room from Nightmare. The Nightmare crew lent the room to the makers of Breakin' 2 and as an homage, you can spot Freddy's glove in the background during the scene where the room is used.
Other than bad movie news, there's not much going on around here as of late. I've been writing more music than normal at work. Instead of writing two second clips of music, I've been writing four second clips of music. I know, it's not a huge jump, but it's something. It's actually refreshing to be doing a little more with music at work. I very much enjoy designing sounds, but writing catchy little songs is just a tad more personally satisfying for me.
Amy has been looking for a new job since the turn of the new year. She's not experiencing the number of roadblocks that I found, but that's not really that surprising and a very good thing to boot. She's already considering a couple of positions that she expects will be offered to her soon. If you want to know more, drop her an email at amylarish AT hotmail DOT com. Please replace the AT with '@' and the DOT with '.' if you want her to get it. I know that there's probably a spider or a bot out there somewhere that can see through that configuration now so I don't know why I even bother.
Other than bad movie news, there's not much going on around here as of late. I've been writing more music than normal at work. Instead of writing two second clips of music, I've been writing four second clips of music. I know, it's not a huge jump, but it's something. It's actually refreshing to be doing a little more with music at work. I very much enjoy designing sounds, but writing catchy little songs is just a tad more personally satisfying for me.
Amy has been looking for a new job since the turn of the new year. She's not experiencing the number of roadblocks that I found, but that's not really that surprising and a very good thing to boot. She's already considering a couple of positions that she expects will be offered to her soon. If you want to know more, drop her an email at amylarish AT hotmail DOT com. Please replace the AT with '@' and the DOT with '.' if you want her to get it. I know that there's probably a spider or a bot out there somewhere that can see through that configuration now so I don't know why I even bother.
Monday, January 31, 2005
B-Fest 2005 Recap
I have emerged victorious on the battlefield of B-Fest for another year. I did not quite make my goal of staying awake for 36 hours straight, but I didn't miss any of the films in their entirity by letting my eyelids shut prematurely. On with the show!
The first salvo of cheesy badness was vaulted with the initial strike of Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers. I hold the opinion that all science fiction movies from the 1950s are based on one of three premises: 1) atomic energy has created an unthinkable event, 2) aliens from a nearby planet are attempting to overthrow the human race, or 3) Communists are scheming a plot involving some combination of the first two scenarios. Earth vs. The Flying Saucers did not stray too far from convention in terms of my opinion, however it did make an easy target for the standard B-Fest chant of "USA! USA!" when the American military opened fire on the aliens without any provocation.
The second film, The Apple, was probably the highlight of the festival due to the facts that it is not as widely known as some of the other films and also completely insane. It is a rock 'n' roll allegory that depicts the distant future of 1994 as a violent corporate-controlled hellscape where everyone wears shiny triangles and drinks from prism-shaped glasses while going completely insane about crappy pop music. If you still want to ever see this film, I don't think I'll be spoiling anything by saying that at the end, God flies down to earth from heaven in a pimped-out golden Volvo to take a hippy commune to heaven. Awesome.
The last film full-length film of Friday evening was The Swarm. I remember watching The Swarm ad nauseum on the Sunday afternoon movie as a kid. In fact, it was those Sunday afternoon movies that gave me my love of "lots of bugs" movies. In my memory, those were the only kinds of movies that were ever on TV on Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I actually enjoyed watching The Swarm again as an adult especially as I recalled my childhood horror of watching a kid's parents go down at the hands of the swarm. Michael Caine's plans always seemed to revolve around blowing lots of stuff up which ended up being truly inspiring when coupled with the "Welcome to Dick Cheney's America!" joke.
The raffle came and went uneventfully for this bloke as it was not in the cards for me to win anything this year. After the raffle, the annual showing of The Wizard of Speed and Time commenced. I was trying to conserve my energy as much as possible so I did not join the stomping throng on stage, but it was good to actually watch the film for a change of pace. After the Wizard showing, the annual showing of Plan 9 From Outer Space began which is when I ducked out for some quality time with Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga.
After Plan 9, the uphill portion of the race began in earnest with Black Caeser, a Larry Cohen blaxploitation flick about a mob boss in Harlem. After actually meeting Larry Cohen last August at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, I knew exactly what to expect from Black Caeser: lots of violence with a heaping helping of social and religious commentary on the side. Black Caeser really wasn't all that bad except for the 30-minute, bullet wounded stagger through New York by the lead character driving the crowd to its first real chant of "End! End! End!" Oh, and James Brown wrote the score for this one.
Black Caeser was followed quickly with a short film that was either about syphillis or sex roles in the 1970s. I can't remember which one of those it was. Regardless, after the short, the projector was given the task of chewing up and spitting out the wad of celluloid known in our program as Beauty and the Robot aka Sexpot Goes to College aka Sex Kittens Go To College, a Mamie Van Doren feature with a performing monkey named Voltaire and a robot that doesn't really do much of anything at all besides getting turned on by Mamie Van Doren. There was way too much dialogue for 3am, but somehow I made it through.
Finally, some action! Death Wish 3 gave us plenty of the mumbling Charles Bronson packing enough firepower to take over a small third world country. While that would have probably made an entertaining movie, he wasn't fighting an entire country. He was only fighting a poorly made-up German dancefloor reject with a strange proclivity for reverse mohawks. Lessons learned: never bring a handgun to a bazooka fight.
The action sparked my energy just enough to stay up for the first 15 minutes of Project Moonbase, a boring talker of a script that proves for a fact that women's liberation absolutely needed to happen. Anyway, Project Moonbase crushed my soul and I fell fast asleep and awoke just in time for the wedding ceremony at the end.
The sexist fog of boredom lifted quickly starting with the opening of 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. Lori Anderson, Jim Varney, and a host of other retarded thugs terrorize a theme park for a ransom of $10,000,000. Needless to say, most of the time, the ninja henchmen run in to each other a lot. One of them is morbidly obese. Criminals this stupid deserved to get their asses handed to them by elementary school ninjas named Tum-Tum. Hilarous computer GUIs abound.
After 3 Ninjas 4, Dennis and I headed out for some real breakfast and decent conversation that didn't involve ridiculous movies. Well, not the whole time anyway. We were gone long enough to miss the first half of Robot Monster, another cardboard classic starring a man in a gorilla suit wearing an old sea diving helmet. His name is Ro-man. The empire crumbles, thankfully.
With our stomachs full and our bloodstreams full of caffeine from all the coffee we drank, we were ready to face the last leg of the horribleness. The next film was a Troma production, Class of Nuke 'Em High. I have a strange affection for movies like this. I never really liked them when I was young and stupid enough to like them, so I attribute my affection to a mild form of mid-life crisis. Regardless, I actually liked this one even without the audience jokes. My favorite part was when one of the cretins removed his large bone from a urinal where he had stashed it during a fight in the boys' restroom. There was a seperate shot devoted to the depiction of his removal of the bone which added a real significance to the whole scene. *ahem*
After the Troma was a short about a guy who golfs with a shovel followed by the full-length feature, Lassie: The Adventures of Neeka. In this case, "full-length feature" is a misnomer as this movie was three episodes of a TV show strung together. The B-Fest audience found the lack of continuity even more confounding due to a couple of reels played out of order. Jump cuts for no good reasons were prevalent in Lassie almost to the point of rivaling MTV. One sequence of cuts rotated between a shot of a tree blowing in the wind, Neeka and Lassie trying their best to appear frightened, and a shutter slamming on an abandoned house. Dennis and I started rotating the comments as the shots changed, "The Ents are slow to anger.", "Eeeeevil!", and "It makes me shudder." This went on for at least 5 minutes which added to the absurdity each time the sequence came around. On the whole, the tag line for this movie, The Adventures of Neeka, was actually quite appropriate as Lassie really didn't do much of anything except for a half-assed job of saving a man from drowning in a two-foot deep lake. If a middle-aged man can't simply stand up in two feet of water, I say let him drown. This movie ended up being the true bone crusher of B-Fest for me.
The end of the Lassie flick meant 12 features down and three to go. We were on the home stretch now. Lassie had completely clocked me upside the head and the caffeine from my breakfast coffee was wearing off so I promplty fell asleep for the majority of The Ice Pirates. I remember seeing this movie in the theater when it came out. I was 10 years old and thought it was pretty funny then. I did stay awake long enough to see Robert Urich avoid getting his groin bitten off by a set of metallic jaws (which incedentally was the ONLY thing I still remembered from the movie after 20 years) and fell asleep not long after. I woke up near the end during the battle in the time warp and soothed my consciousness back to full power for the last two films.
The next movie was It! The Terror From Beyond Space. In this movie, an alien hops on board a spaceship as a murderous stowaway and begins systematically dispatching the crew. I know it sounds a lot like Alien, but unfortunately it wasn't nearly as exciting. It did, however, have a great scene in which two of the characters walked on the outside of the ship Batman style which as we all know means that the camera was tilted 90 degrees. It! also had the distinction of containing, out of any of the movies shown, the most female officers onboard who are there only to scream and serve the male officers coffee and sandwiches.
Following the credits of It!, the coup-de-grace of B-Fest 2005 commenced: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. What good can't be said about a film with more neon colors than an '80s night club in which Ice-T raps to help save a community center that teaches inner city kids to dance like poorly constructed robots with a few short circuits? If there exists such a negative critique, I haven't heard it! At this point, my mind must have really been fried, though, because I can't recall too many specifics from the movie except for a stuffed toy that represents some girlfriends being ripped in half, a guy named Turbo dancing in a rotating room and then not long after taking a flying leap down a flight of concrete stairs. Oh, and a set of really hairy armpits!! The only real thing I took home from this movies was a severe case of temporary blindness because of all the neon outfits. Thank God for grunge because if I'd had to deal with that as a high school student, I would have strangled someone.
And with the final credits of Breakin' 2 rolling, a good number of B-Fest attendees danced away on the stage as the rest of us picked up a bunch of Plan 9 paper plates and headed blearily to our transportation. If you read this whole post, you now know a small piece of the grind that is B-Fest and despite all that, maybe you'll still want to come out for 2006. Until next year, I bid B-Fest adieu!
The first salvo of cheesy badness was vaulted with the initial strike of Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers. I hold the opinion that all science fiction movies from the 1950s are based on one of three premises: 1) atomic energy has created an unthinkable event, 2) aliens from a nearby planet are attempting to overthrow the human race, or 3) Communists are scheming a plot involving some combination of the first two scenarios. Earth vs. The Flying Saucers did not stray too far from convention in terms of my opinion, however it did make an easy target for the standard B-Fest chant of "USA! USA!" when the American military opened fire on the aliens without any provocation.
The second film, The Apple, was probably the highlight of the festival due to the facts that it is not as widely known as some of the other films and also completely insane. It is a rock 'n' roll allegory that depicts the distant future of 1994 as a violent corporate-controlled hellscape where everyone wears shiny triangles and drinks from prism-shaped glasses while going completely insane about crappy pop music. If you still want to ever see this film, I don't think I'll be spoiling anything by saying that at the end, God flies down to earth from heaven in a pimped-out golden Volvo to take a hippy commune to heaven. Awesome.
The last film full-length film of Friday evening was The Swarm. I remember watching The Swarm ad nauseum on the Sunday afternoon movie as a kid. In fact, it was those Sunday afternoon movies that gave me my love of "lots of bugs" movies. In my memory, those were the only kinds of movies that were ever on TV on Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I actually enjoyed watching The Swarm again as an adult especially as I recalled my childhood horror of watching a kid's parents go down at the hands of the swarm. Michael Caine's plans always seemed to revolve around blowing lots of stuff up which ended up being truly inspiring when coupled with the "Welcome to Dick Cheney's America!" joke.
The raffle came and went uneventfully for this bloke as it was not in the cards for me to win anything this year. After the raffle, the annual showing of The Wizard of Speed and Time commenced. I was trying to conserve my energy as much as possible so I did not join the stomping throng on stage, but it was good to actually watch the film for a change of pace. After the Wizard showing, the annual showing of Plan 9 From Outer Space began which is when I ducked out for some quality time with Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga.
After Plan 9, the uphill portion of the race began in earnest with Black Caeser, a Larry Cohen blaxploitation flick about a mob boss in Harlem. After actually meeting Larry Cohen last August at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, I knew exactly what to expect from Black Caeser: lots of violence with a heaping helping of social and religious commentary on the side. Black Caeser really wasn't all that bad except for the 30-minute, bullet wounded stagger through New York by the lead character driving the crowd to its first real chant of "End! End! End!" Oh, and James Brown wrote the score for this one.
Black Caeser was followed quickly with a short film that was either about syphillis or sex roles in the 1970s. I can't remember which one of those it was. Regardless, after the short, the projector was given the task of chewing up and spitting out the wad of celluloid known in our program as Beauty and the Robot aka Sexpot Goes to College aka Sex Kittens Go To College, a Mamie Van Doren feature with a performing monkey named Voltaire and a robot that doesn't really do much of anything at all besides getting turned on by Mamie Van Doren. There was way too much dialogue for 3am, but somehow I made it through.
Finally, some action! Death Wish 3 gave us plenty of the mumbling Charles Bronson packing enough firepower to take over a small third world country. While that would have probably made an entertaining movie, he wasn't fighting an entire country. He was only fighting a poorly made-up German dancefloor reject with a strange proclivity for reverse mohawks. Lessons learned: never bring a handgun to a bazooka fight.
The action sparked my energy just enough to stay up for the first 15 minutes of Project Moonbase, a boring talker of a script that proves for a fact that women's liberation absolutely needed to happen. Anyway, Project Moonbase crushed my soul and I fell fast asleep and awoke just in time for the wedding ceremony at the end.
The sexist fog of boredom lifted quickly starting with the opening of 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. Lori Anderson, Jim Varney, and a host of other retarded thugs terrorize a theme park for a ransom of $10,000,000. Needless to say, most of the time, the ninja henchmen run in to each other a lot. One of them is morbidly obese. Criminals this stupid deserved to get their asses handed to them by elementary school ninjas named Tum-Tum. Hilarous computer GUIs abound.
After 3 Ninjas 4, Dennis and I headed out for some real breakfast and decent conversation that didn't involve ridiculous movies. Well, not the whole time anyway. We were gone long enough to miss the first half of Robot Monster, another cardboard classic starring a man in a gorilla suit wearing an old sea diving helmet. His name is Ro-man. The empire crumbles, thankfully.
With our stomachs full and our bloodstreams full of caffeine from all the coffee we drank, we were ready to face the last leg of the horribleness. The next film was a Troma production, Class of Nuke 'Em High. I have a strange affection for movies like this. I never really liked them when I was young and stupid enough to like them, so I attribute my affection to a mild form of mid-life crisis. Regardless, I actually liked this one even without the audience jokes. My favorite part was when one of the cretins removed his large bone from a urinal where he had stashed it during a fight in the boys' restroom. There was a seperate shot devoted to the depiction of his removal of the bone which added a real significance to the whole scene. *ahem*
After the Troma was a short about a guy who golfs with a shovel followed by the full-length feature, Lassie: The Adventures of Neeka. In this case, "full-length feature" is a misnomer as this movie was three episodes of a TV show strung together. The B-Fest audience found the lack of continuity even more confounding due to a couple of reels played out of order. Jump cuts for no good reasons were prevalent in Lassie almost to the point of rivaling MTV. One sequence of cuts rotated between a shot of a tree blowing in the wind, Neeka and Lassie trying their best to appear frightened, and a shutter slamming on an abandoned house. Dennis and I started rotating the comments as the shots changed, "The Ents are slow to anger.", "Eeeeevil!", and "It makes me shudder." This went on for at least 5 minutes which added to the absurdity each time the sequence came around. On the whole, the tag line for this movie, The Adventures of Neeka, was actually quite appropriate as Lassie really didn't do much of anything except for a half-assed job of saving a man from drowning in a two-foot deep lake. If a middle-aged man can't simply stand up in two feet of water, I say let him drown. This movie ended up being the true bone crusher of B-Fest for me.
The end of the Lassie flick meant 12 features down and three to go. We were on the home stretch now. Lassie had completely clocked me upside the head and the caffeine from my breakfast coffee was wearing off so I promplty fell asleep for the majority of The Ice Pirates. I remember seeing this movie in the theater when it came out. I was 10 years old and thought it was pretty funny then. I did stay awake long enough to see Robert Urich avoid getting his groin bitten off by a set of metallic jaws (which incedentally was the ONLY thing I still remembered from the movie after 20 years) and fell asleep not long after. I woke up near the end during the battle in the time warp and soothed my consciousness back to full power for the last two films.
The next movie was It! The Terror From Beyond Space. In this movie, an alien hops on board a spaceship as a murderous stowaway and begins systematically dispatching the crew. I know it sounds a lot like Alien, but unfortunately it wasn't nearly as exciting. It did, however, have a great scene in which two of the characters walked on the outside of the ship Batman style which as we all know means that the camera was tilted 90 degrees. It! also had the distinction of containing, out of any of the movies shown, the most female officers onboard who are there only to scream and serve the male officers coffee and sandwiches.
Following the credits of It!, the coup-de-grace of B-Fest 2005 commenced: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. What good can't be said about a film with more neon colors than an '80s night club in which Ice-T raps to help save a community center that teaches inner city kids to dance like poorly constructed robots with a few short circuits? If there exists such a negative critique, I haven't heard it! At this point, my mind must have really been fried, though, because I can't recall too many specifics from the movie except for a stuffed toy that represents some girlfriends being ripped in half, a guy named Turbo dancing in a rotating room and then not long after taking a flying leap down a flight of concrete stairs. Oh, and a set of really hairy armpits!! The only real thing I took home from this movies was a severe case of temporary blindness because of all the neon outfits. Thank God for grunge because if I'd had to deal with that as a high school student, I would have strangled someone.
And with the final credits of Breakin' 2 rolling, a good number of B-Fest attendees danced away on the stage as the rest of us picked up a bunch of Plan 9 paper plates and headed blearily to our transportation. If you read this whole post, you now know a small piece of the grind that is B-Fest and despite all that, maybe you'll still want to come out for 2006. Until next year, I bid B-Fest adieu!
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