Daron: Okay, we failed to post a liner note in February. In our defense, it was a short month.
ctan: And then we failed to post a liner note in March, too. In my defense, I’ve been busy writing a novel. Where were you?
Daron: On the road, of course. But we have lots of cool links and things to share this month.
ctan: First, most important thing, if you didn’t see it earlier, I polled readers recently about what we should do this summer with DGC. Basically, I’m going to be writing not just one novel this summer, but two, in addition to DGC, and to accomplish that I need to cut back on DGC somewhat. I gave folks the choice of 2 months of total hiatus or 4 months of one post a week. Folks voted overwhelmingly in favor of once a week, and hatched the idea that if I post new content on Tuesdays, fans could post in the Thursday slot!
Daron: I’m all for it.
ctan: So we’re looking for fans who would like to post content that would be of interest to other fans of DGC. So that could be fanworks like fic, memes, songs, art, etc… or it could be meta- or reviews of media like books or songs that you like and you want to share with other fans.
Daron: We could also use some help with admin of those posts.Uh, update, apparently the fabulous Amanda is going to help with posting the Thursday posts.
ctan: Yes! I could really use a volunteer who is familiar with Word Press to help with setting up the fan posts. They can be set up in advance and pre-loaded to post on the particular day so it’s not like you have to make sure you’re awake Thursday at 10am Eastern time to launch it. Heaven knows I’m usually not.
Here’s the schedule of posts we’ve got so far:
May 7: Bonnie fic vignette
May 14: Amy art
May 21: Mel fanfic
May 28: Joe timeline graphics
June 4: Sanders
June 11: Stef’s memes
June 18
June 25: Lenalena book review 1 of 3
July 2
July 9
July 16
July 23
July 30 Lenalena book review 2 of 3
August 6
August 13
August 20 Chris
August 27 Lenalena book review 3 of 3
Daron: No one likes to turn down gigs. Ever. But even you can’t be in two places at once.
ctan: Exactly. I can only write so many words per week, even though I can juggle several writing projects at the same time. I do hit a limit.
Daron: Another thing we have been wanting to get going for the fandom is the forums. We installed them 7-8 months ago but it took some configuring. Here’s the deal, though:
DGC FAN FORUM
Find it here: https://daron.ceciliatan.com/forums
The Forum has two sections:
DGC Discussion: for fans only, ctan and daron will stay out
Off-Topic: the forum for things only tangentially related to DGC
To register: you have to sign up for a user account on the site:
https://daron.ceciliatan.com/wp-login.php?action=register
You go and type in a name and your email address and WordPress will email you a password.
Once you are logged in to daron.ceciliatan.com you are automatically assigned “subscriber” level permissions. Subscribers have the ability to post to the forum, create new topics, reply, etc. Visit the main forum directory to get going: https://daron.ceciliatan.com/forums/
Or test out whether you can reply to this thread on videos/songs from the 1980s or 1990s: https://daron.ceciliatan.com/forums/topic/suggest-videos-from-the-1980s-1990
ctan: If anyone wants to volunteer to moderate the forums, let me know.
Daron: Do you have to be moderate in order to moderate?
ctan: Preferably. OK. So what do you think about the new Adam Lambert song.
Daron: Ziggy.
ctan: That’s what you think?
Daron: Yes.
ctan: You have a one-track mind.
Daron: A song about fame and heartbreak in the soullessness of Hollywood doesn’t remind you of Ziggy???
ctan: Well, when you put it like THAT…
Daron: In other news, it’s been a really rough time recently for touring musicians. Did you read about the heavy metal dude who fell out of the tour bus thinking he was opening the door to the john? Here: The Telegraph.
ctan: All I can think is…the doors open from the inside? While the bus is moving?
Daron: I don’t know what model of bus it was. On most of ours the driver would have to open the door for you. This one sounded like maybe it had a back door? I don’t know. And then there’s Twin Shadow, whose bus collided with a tractor trailer, and…in a weird coincidence, the bus of another band (Thompson Square) but who weren’t in the bus at the time. From USA Today.
ctan: I hope the bus driver is all right. It says firefighters had to cut him out of the bus.
Daron: You mean they cut the bus to get him out when you say that, right?
ctan: Right.
Daron: Then there’s poor Kirk Hammett of Metallica, who apparently lost his iPhone which had 250 riffs he’d recorded for the upcoming album.
ctan: Jeez. Back up your files, kids. I bet AC/DC’s drummer is having a worse time than Hammett, though.
Daron: He lost his phone?
ctan: More like his mind. After Phil Rudd’s solo album tanked, he tried to hire a hit man to kill his assistant. And then the police found a lot of drugs in his house… and then he plead guilty to the charges? And…see if you can make sense of it in Rolling Stone.
Daron: Wow, we’re just full of laughter and light today.
ctan: You do seem sort of down.
Daron: I don’t know why but I’m really melancholy today. I’m just…sad.
ctan: Here, maybe this will make you feel better. It’s a 1985 photo of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry from a Japanese magazine that Joe Perry tweeted.
Daron: Is Tyler BITING Perry’s shirt…? These guys are straight, right?
ctan: Rabidly heterosexual by all accounts. Yet I’d say the word “bent” may apply. Then there’s this:
Daron: Hozier–isn’t he the guy who just took a stand on marriage equality in Ireland? I confess I know even less about him than I know about Sergei Polunin.
ctan: How do you know about Sergei Polunin?
Daron: Just look at him. Plus, you know, I have a professional interest in gorgeous and insanely talented megalomaniacal men who rocket to fame at an early age. *coughs*
ctan: You really have Ziggy on the brain today.
Daron: I do. You want to hear the most beautiful sad song ever? Here:
Daron: That’s the incredible voice of Polly Bolton.
ctan: Wow. Jeez, now I’m in a melancholy mood, too.
Daron: Then you’re ready to read this. Here’s a strange but fascinating story, of Mingering Mike, The Soul Legend Who Never Existed: The Guardian.
ctan: I want to say something profound about how pop music shapes our lives…
Daron: But you always say that. Now nerd out with me please, in honor of the new Star Wars trailer: Millennium Falcon Guitar.
ctan: Do you want one?
Daron: No. But I wouldn’t mine playing one in a video.
ctan: What did you think of the trailer?
Daron: I think I’m such a cynic I should keep my mouth shut. Insert “A New Hope” joke here.
ctan: I think they basically just proved they can make a 2-minute long thing that makes the whole fandom go nuts in a good way. The question is, can they make a 2-hour long thing that can do that? I was very unimpressed with Star Trek: Into Darkness for a lot of reasons: terrible logic holes in the plot, overdoing the “fan service” to the point the story made no sense, uselessly shoe-horning the Khan backstory into what could otherwise have been an interesting villain… yeah, just overdoing it all around. I’m glad I waited until it came to streaming. Speaking of science fiction, one of the best rock and roll novels of all time, Lew Shiner’s Glimpses is back in print.
Daron: And speaking of streaming, that was the other weird music industry news of recent days. Somehow Jay Z and Madonna and Rihanna and a bunch of other huge huge artists all banded together to start a new streaming service, Tidal? As Gawker pointed out they “think you are willing to pay double the price of other streaming music services to pay for their streaming music service, because they are crazy…. It’s more expensive because it’s “higher quality” and “artist-owned,” which is important because Usher, Daft Punk, and Madonna have been living in wretched penury for far too long, and it’s time for people to give back. ”
ctan: They do seem kind of out of touch…
Daron: I think it’s typical big industry hype. Even thought Tidal is so-called “artist owned” this is pure big biz hype. And Jay Z could buy and sell some whole record companies himself, so it’s a little hard to see Tidal as the little streaming service that could. I’d go back to Beats Music before trying Tidal.
ctan: I’ve gotten pretty attached to Pandora, even if the ads are starting to get ridiculous. Maybe I should start paying for it. They even played Boiled in Lead the other night! Not this song but here:
Daron: Wait, wait, wait, I just realized. We can’t talk about Adam Lambert without mentioning our other other favorite out gay singer, Steve Grand, whose Kickstarted album is finally out. Here he is in The Washington Blade.
ctan: I found some of the songs on the album kind of bland, but I like Steve, anyway. That song is fun, though. Have you noticed it sounds a little like a song that came out when I was two years old?
Daron: See, now we’re in a more upbeat mood. Power of music, man. Power of music.
14 Comments
Pay for Pandora already! It’s less than $40 a year. No more having to buy massage mudic ever.
I already pay for Sirius/XM — I only switch to pandora when I get bored of that.
Long-awaited, but very entertaining!
Thanks!
I’m very sad to learn about Twin Shadow. George used to front a shockingly great Boston indie band called Mad Man Films. I hope he’s okay; apparently he needs hand surgery? Sucks.
I know. Here’s hoping to all goes well.
You guys might not want to watch Hozier’s actual video for Take Me to Church. It’s a statement about how horribly the Russian government allows gays to be treated. I cried. He’s awesome though. I’ve read a couple interviews from him. He’s very outspoken about equality and says homophobia “should offend us all.” And he’s straight, in case you were wondering.
Yeah. Here’s an article about his stand on marriage equality, which is up for vote in Ireland on May 22.
http://www.glaad.org/blog/video-join-hozier-calling-marriage-equality-ireland
I love that you were unimpressed with ST:ID. It’s comforting to know I really, despite what the girlfriend *still* insists, was not the only one. We had an actual shouting match on the steps of the theater because she loved it so very much and I… did not. At all. I can’t even bring myself to watch it again, even though I’ve both had the DVD since December and watched the first of the two new Trek roughly two dozen times.
I’m glad to have no stake in the Star Wars fandom. I’ve never seen the first three, and only saw one of the newer ones while in a hotel in Amsterdam, high as hell on cough syrup (because god bless the British health care system and their treating American students for free with enough codeine to tranq a horse). It took me an hour and a half to figure out I wasn’t losing my mind or my grasp on English– it was just overdubbed in Dutch.
I was a Trekkie before Star Wars, but I was an original Star Wars kid, too. I was what, eleven when it came out? And when it eventually came to HBO I watched it about 50 times, to the point I could quote the entire movie word for word.
But yeah, when it comes to Star Trek I was deeply into the Original Show when I was a kid in the seventies, and then the animated series, and then I bought the books from SF Book Club of all the scripts. When the first Star Trek movie came out I went on a sort of kind of date with the one really nerdy boy in my class and we loved it. I later watched it again and thought, jeez, this is paced really badly and actually is really dull and boring toward the end. All these long shots of Spock floating through space…what drugs were they on when they made this?
But yeah, ST:ID. I watched about the first 45 minutes and was thinking, huh, it’s a pretty good tightly plotted thing they have going on here. corwin called on the phone at that point and I told him so. Then the wheels come off: as soon as they go to the Klingon home planet the plot holes start to get enormous, and then the “big reveal” that he’s Khan? It was like…did they think people going to see this movie didn’t read all the press about how it was a Wrath of Khan remake? And from there it was like a crazed fanfic on steroids, cramming in every possible reference to Wrath of Khan and other ST movies, but with lots of Kirk-Spock reversals, which should have been really cool and awesome and enjoyable and instead just had be going WTF that makes no sense with either this plot OR this character and hang on a second, no, OMG, really? It was to the point it was actually boring me. They really tried to do too much and didn’t actually play to the strengths of ANY of the actors (Cumberbatch is wasted on a script where he barely even has any lines…?!). And I could go on. You can see how hard the filmmakers tried, but they really failed. Sigh. I *wanted* to like it. I really did.
EXACTLY. It was like every character we knew and maybe liked from the first movie was put through a blender then strained through the worst dregs of fanfic then smacked into a plot that was written in a chat room by a team of cracked-out monkeys with a grudge against women and logic.
Cumberbatch was wasted and typecast into a role too similar in arrogance to Sherlock. I couldn’t stop thinking “I’m watching Cumberbatch. Where’s Martin Freeman?” More egregious, though, was the utter waste of the main cast. Karl Urban got maybe five lines. Zoe Saldana upped her skills in crying on cue but not much else (Bones and Uhura are most of why I loved the reboot, and the way they played off of Kirk, none of which was seen here). I like movies that have teams–I’m all over Avengers lately–and where those teams function together. This took the idea of a crew and crew-as-family and threw it out in service to three new and unimpressive characters.
The only upside I’ve seen so far to the series continuing is that Simon Pegg is one of the writers.
Exactly. They tried to do too much. And now Nimoy is gone: I feel like they wasted any chance to do much with Spock Prime, too.
Bah humbug. Maybe it’ll get better, but I won’t hold my breath.
My codeine trip was in Paris, 1996, teaching Business Process Reengineering to French and German consultants. Terrible cough, WONDERFUL French cough syrup. Eventually I lost the ability to speak either English or French and had to do the whole thing in German. Fortunately, a bi-lingual consultant translated.
While traveling in Asia I discovered this stuff:
“Madame Pearl’s Chesty Cough Syrup.” No idea WTF was in it but it was fcking GREAT and they confiscated it at customs when I tried to bring it into the States.