The Guitar Store Experience

Several months ago I bought a new guitar.  Since I bought it from a guitar store, it is that store’s policy (as it is with most or all guitar stores) that string changes and set-ups are free for the life of the instrument.  Considering a set-up can run you $80 easily, this ain’t a bad deal.  The advantage to this is obvious.  I now have it set up every time I change the strings.  Also, in my defense, I have THEM change the strings because the guitar has a floating bridge and I don’t feel like dealing with that myself yet.

The disadvantage, though, is that it puts me in a guitar store about once every month to six weeks, at minimum.  (By the way, I’m calling it a “guitar store” to differentiate a place that sells musical equipment–not just guitars–from a “music store” which could be confused with the “record store”).  The reason that frequenting these places is a pain is obvious to those of us who play instruments, but perhaps not so much to those who don’t.  The reason I don’t like going to the guitar store so often isn’t because I’m afraid I’ll spend money–it’s easy to avoid $350 impulse buys–it’s because of the notorious nature of the demeanors of the guitar store employees and guitar store frequenters.  The folks that work or hang out regularly in these places are like some special kind of vampire that feed on feigning extreme superiority over their fellow musicians–and that analogy includes the insatiable nature of their hunger.  *I* for one always thought it would be a neat experience to work in, or even own, a guitar store, but it actually seems like many of these guys are walking through an eternal hell of frustration and simplicity and a general lack of respect for their obvious expertise, dude.  I also thought it would be cool to be someone that was on a first-name-basis with those folks, especially places here in Seattle, because these are guys that real professionals come to and depend on, but those that are are so icy cold to anyone that’s an unfamiliar face that it chills me even to walk by them.  And sometimes I’m not completely sure any of these people are aware of the states of their existence.

So what goes on?  Egos.  Insecurities.  Differences in opinion.  You think it’s bad when you sit a PC nut and a Mac nut next to each other?  Try watching what happens when you put a customer who likes digital effects in front of a staff member who’s all about analog.  Or send a guy to try out an amp that starts playing some Death Cab in front of a guy who started playing thirty years ago because someone played him some Zeppelin.  Much of this is simply being fallible humans with abilities that we foolishly let define our self-worth, but that’s really just the start.  You put a guy who knows how to think about himself and receive for himself due to his skill on an instrument into a situation where he’s expected to think about other people, some of them rude, some difficult, and some frankly completely moronic (i.e., customer service), and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.  Multiply that problem by a couple of generations of staff and turnovers and you have an environment that is bad enough that a very good guitarist I know says he avoids guitar stores as much as possible, now.  He just can’t take it anymore.

And the regulars?  I’ve been told that many regulars actually annoy the employees, too (but that doesn’t get the employees off the hook).  Some of them so obviously to me went there to try to show off how fast their fingers can move that I doubt they know that’s why they’re there.  They’ve lost touch with reality to that degree.  But honestly those regulars aren’t even the worst ones–the worst ones are the buddies of the employees that chat who-knows-what with them all day and make you feel like dirt for interrupting so you can buy some freaking guitar strings.  If  you need to ask actual questions about some gear, you’d better wait until the employee comes to you, lest you be (at best) chuckled at for wanting to check out a solid-state Peavey amp.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that you are looked upon as an inferior animal in a guitar store.  We start out naïvely walking into one hoping to find someone excited about the six-string that’s equally excited to help us improve our knowledge and maybe, a little at a time, our gear.  But we quickly figure out that this is not a retailer-customer relationship.  Oh, no.  It is a skill competition.  Most of the time you just know that the guy is better than you at everything guitar related and you feel him rubbing it in just by him “helping.”

Play anything less than "Eruption" and you're the joke for the rest of the day.

And pray–PRAY–that the guy doesn’t actually demonstrate something before handing you the guitar.  I’ve had that happen.  “You just did 32nd notes across the neck at 120 bpm.  I’m not touching that thing.  I never can.  In fact, I might quit playing.”  Insecurity is a big problem, and if we’d just get over it, they’d have no power over us.  But easier said than done.

Before I go any further, I want to of course offer the disclaimer that not every employee of a music store I’ve ever met is like this.  I can think of . . . six from the fourteen stores I can currently remember interacting with their staff.  Yes, I counted.  (And as I write this, I keep remembering more stores, but not more nice employees.)  So those people–two of which work at the store I currently frequent and one of those changes the strings on my guitar–are cool.  But all fourteen stores had at least one employee that, whether they knew it or not, made me feel an inch tall for even daring to talk to them.  Actually, only one of them had just one, and only three guys worked there and I was personal friends with the other two . . . hmph.

So this is rough, right?  Musicians can’t logically buy their stuff off of Amazon and Musician’s Friend all the time.  You need to try the stuff out; you need to have guarantees of service; you need to be able to hold and compare gear.  Plus the option to trade in isn’t a bad addition, either.  So what to do?  Well, if you’re going to avoid difficult interactions with these people when going into a guitar shop, there are few things you need to do or not do.  Let’s go over some of them.

DON’T . . .
. . . Exist.  I guess we’re off to a tough start.  By merely walking into a music store and actually having a physical presence, you are more than likely going to annoy one of these guys.  So avoid existing.  Got it?  Next . . .

. . . Ask for guidance.  One time I decided I wanted to change the pickups on one of my guitars for purely aesthetic reasons.  They’re not amazing pickups to start, so no harm could be done overall to the guitar if I’m upgrading to something like Gibson 57′s, but my primary motivation is that it would look really cool.

Seriously! Imagine that thing with some chrome humbuckers! YOW!

I asked one guy at one store for advice, and in the tone and body language that made me very sorry for bothering him, he said, “You can’t just change out pickups like strings.”  I went to a different store to ask the same thing and he took one look at the guitar and said with a near-sigh, “It’ll cost more than the guitar’s worth . . .”  For the record, it’s a low-end guitar and I KNOW that, but it’s not a “Wal-Mart guitar.”  Sheesh.

. . . Ask general questions.  There’s no better way to make one of these guys mad for wasting their time.  Rockman on Yahoo! Answers tells his story:

I picked up the guitar in my teens as soon as it occurred to me that I should AND as the opportunity hit just right.  To this day, I play TOTALLY by ear, can’t read a note.  However, I don’t know what this one guy’s thing with me was–perhaps he was put off that I wasn’t “formal”–and he was The Proprietor of the place!  After frequenting his locale for everything from strings to some books, etc, one day I asked him a perfectly innocent question in near-reverent tones of a teenager asking an elder for his personal advice.  In a most condescending monotone he snapped, “You should tune your guitar as often as it needs it!”  I couldn’t believe he thought I’d said that after several convos wherein I know he knew I was perfectly coherent.  What I’d asked was, “How often do you CHANGE your strings?”  I realized during my stroll home that perhaps his hearing had dissipated, but the insult wasn’t even Ethical with me, no, MY thing has remained Intellectual–as in, if anything wouldn’t he’ve looked up and asked me if he heard me right.  I mean, he was on site 6 days a week, he clearly knew his music, he wasn’t dumb or on drugs, he couldn’t've been more than mid-40s. …and, as importantly as anything, I wasn’t some kid hangin’ around, blasting amps with hoodlum friends…I never went back, either!

I should add in that I’ve asked how often to change strings and been understood perfectly well, and still talked down to.

. . . Be stumped by a guitar problem, ever.  A good friend of mine had problems with his Gibson SG not staying in tune when he bent the strings.  One of the things you need to do with a guitar is to stretch the strings out so that there’s no stretch left in them when you bend them and they don’t lose their pitch.  Well, he’d done that and figured something was wrong with the guitar.  Maybe the tuners were loose.  He took it to his guitar guy who, before my friend could finish explaining what he’d done, said, “Oh, well you just gotta stretch the strings out.”  This guy stretched the strings out and the problem was fixed.  I can speak up and state with absolute assurance that my friend knows how to take care of a guitar, but he still walked out of there with his tail between his legs.

DO . . .

. . . Know exactly what your tastes and preferences and desires are for any musical situation before even stepping foot in the store.  You cannot browse a guitar store with intent to buy, but requiring salesman assistance, without having to answer a billion questions about your “preferences” that you may not necessarily know the answer to.  But that salesman knows what he wants in every detail and exactly how he wants it and Lord help you if you prevent him from getting it.  So how is it YOU don’t have any idea what YOU want?  You probably suck at guitar.  I once went shopping for some kind of device that let me play guitar through headphones.  I knew someting had to exist, but I didn’t know what.  I was also sure there was a variety of choices available . . . so I asked a guy.

“Well what do you want to do with it?”
“Play through headphones because I live in an apartment.”
“So do you want to record with it?”
“I don’t know.  Maybe someday, but I don’t have recording stuff right now.“
“Do you want effects in it?”
“I guess . . . the headphones are what’s important, though.”
[annoyed] “Well lots of things let you play through headphones; I need to know what you want to help you find something.”
“As long as it lets me use headphones, it’s fine.”

See?  The normal approach would be, “You require a single function, these are the other options you have with that single function available.  Which would you prefer?”  Instead I got “You require a single function.  That’s not enough information because there are other options available with that single function.”

 . . . Know absolutely everything about the guitar there is to know–ever.  Oh, the condescension I got in the question, “When was the last time you had this guitar set up?”  Set up?  What’s that?  I didn’t know and I’d been playing for eleven years.  (A “set up” is making sure the neck is trussed right, the strings are intonated correctly, the pickups are sitting the right distance from the strings, and so on).  And the time I mentioned my guitar had a bit of a buzz?  “It’s the nature of the instrument to have a slight buzz.”  Oh.  Funny.  I was always told that a buzz was bad, but if you say so.  Thank goodness I never had to deal with these guys in my early days before I knew what the bridge and the nut were.  I know a lot, now, but I am still susceptible through conversations about wood types, neck contours, tuning machine differences, and so on.  Just a couple weeks ago I was buying some strings.  This store didn’t have my preferred size, so I was stuck getting something else (I was using a Groupon).  I wanted hex-core strings (vs. round-core), but wasn’t sure what brands had it.  One of the guys went into the other room to ask the main guitar guy and came back, “he says 99% of the wall is hex-core, and if it’s round-core it’s marked.”  Well how do you like that?  The guy wasn’t even in the same room and he got me.

So if  you ever end up needing to go into a guitar store, I hope this information can prepare you.  Tough skin is the best defense.  Godspeed.

The Most Ridiculous Comment Section Thread I’ve Ever Been a Part Of

It was a few months ago that I was at KOMO’s website and stumbled over an article called “First Date Tips:  Talk About George W. Bush.”  Now obviously I don’t care about or need dating tips anymore, but the “Talk About George W. Bush” thing seemed at least mildly amusing enough to get me to mindlessly click on it.  Naturally, the article wasn’t that interesting (probably mostly because, as I said, I don’t care about or need dating tips), but at the end of this list of “Do’s” and “Do not’s,” I caught a comment by a user named “Ron Burgandy” (sic) that amused me.

Now like most red-blooded, white, American males who were in their 20′s in 2005, I love the movie Anchorman.  And while it sometimes gets overly quoted, THIS was a good place for it.  It worked, and I laughed.

I’ve heard that quote used before, too.  And when it does, I like to follow up with the next line in the movie.

If you’re as nit-picky as I am, you may notice that I slightly misquoted it.  Ron doesn’t say “any” in the movie, just “That doesn’t make sense.”  As minor as that seems, it is worth noting as we move forward with the story.

Within a few minutes to a few hours, I got an email notification that “Ron Burgandy” replied.  “Fun!” I thought, as I was sure he was going to continue the back-and-forth I’d just stared.

Nope.

Of course they’re lines from the movie, “Ron.”  I know that; it’s why I said what I said.  My eye-rolling at this was strong enough to overcome a significant portion of my growing comment-section-restraint-maturity that I responded–

Then I went and found that scene in Anchorman on YouTube and added a second comment with nothing but the link.

And that should be it, right?  Done deal.  Guy quotes movie, second guy quotes next line in movie, guy doesn’t get it, second guy provides information for guy to see that he also quoted the movie.  The only logical next action on his part is one of two things.  He could feel silly and keep quiet, never acknowledging that I responded, because he saw what I had said but doesn’t want to admit he goofed; OR he comments with something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s right–my bad.”

But that’s not at all what “Ron Burgandy” did.

Wow.  Let’s evaluate what’s happened here.  It seems that “Ron” took my comment, and the subsequent video link, to mean that I was berating him because he didn’t quote Anchorman 100% verbatim and therefore he got it all wrong and should feel foolish.  Would anyone disagree with my assessment of his perspective?  And to think I was a little embarrassed by slightly misquoting it myself.

A few days later I got around to actually responding, and all I did was briefly point out what I thought would be known in the first place by a guy naming himself after a character in a movie he’s quoting.  I don’t have much else to add.  I just find myself needing an audience when ridiculousness of this magnitude comes my way.

An Open Letter to George Lucas

Dear Mr. Lucas,

I hope this finds you well.  Up front I’d like to apologize for being yet another Star Wars fan coming along to complain about the prequel trilogy, but please persist as you may find my take on this a little different from what you’re likely used to.

Let’s first mention that the prequels, in my opinion, were terrible.  I really liked episodes I and III in the theater, but upon seeing The Phantom Menace on VHS, and after a few months to think about Revenge of the Sith, I realized just how awful and poorly put together they were.  For posterity, I’ll mention that, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I thought Attack of the Clones  was awful while I was in the theater.  Seeing THAT one on VHS a year later only confirmed my feelings and I’ve not seen it since.

I’m not completely convinced that you and many other people out there really understand how big of a deal it is that those movies were so bad.  I loved Star Wars as a young child, and upon entering my adolescence discovered that nothing could have been cooler than spaceships and lightsabers.  I read several expanded universe books (the one I remember the best is The Truce at Bakura, if you happen to know that one).  I ate up the comic series Tales of the Jedi, which told stories of Jedi 4000 years before Luke Skywalker was even born.  It was really cool.  I watched the original trilogy so many times . . . I’d rather not try to count.  It’s easily over 100 viewings for each movie, and I’m completely serious.  I can still quote entire scenes from memory, and watching them even today I can’t help but say the lines right as or right before they happen, like listening to a song I’ve known for years.

“Darth Vader!  Only you could be so bold.  The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this; when they hear you’ve attacked a diplo–”
“Don’t act so surprised your highness, you weren’t on any mercy mission this time.  Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies; I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I’m a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan.”
“You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor!  Take her away!”

I could keep going with that scene without even having to pop the DVD in or looking it up online.  All the way through the part where Threepio cries out to the Sandcrawler from the Dune Sea. “Oh-vah hee-uh!!! Hey!  Heeeeeey!  Help!  Pleeeeease heeeelp!”  I hear the music intensify and see the screen wipe as I type that.

You could ask me anything about those movies, and to a degree about the expanded universe, and I could answer without hesitation.  And if someone said I was wrong, then I kindly informed them that their information was off–and even now at age 31 I say with all confidence that I WAS right in those situations.  I KNEW those movies.  I KNEW those characters.  I KNEW that story.

Now, I noticed pretty early on that the 1977 Star Wars was numbered “Episode IV,” and that this meant that there MUST be three more movies on the way.  I’d date this discovery on my part at around age 12, or 1992-1993.  And then the prequels were announced.  It was right around the time that the original trilogy was remastered with THX and re-released.  The magazine article I read mentioned that the titles at the time for the three movies were “The Clone Wars,” “The Wrath of Darth Vader,” and “Fall of the Republic.”  Granted, this was like 1994 or 1995 (putting me at age 14), and I understand that early in the creative process of film making titles are thrown around, but those names shaped what I was expecting from the future movies.  I spent lots of my free mental time daydreaming about the plots and the scenes and the emotional climaxes, and how certain story elements can be used to “set up” the original trilogy so that all six feel like a single unit. I’m not kidding–I spent a lot of time thinking about it and internally getting giddy with anticipation.

Come early 1997 when the special editions were released, people loved to talk to me about how there are three NEW Star Wars movies coming soon, and I’d tell them, “Yeah, I’ve known for years.”  I was a pro, George; make no mistake about it.

Star Wars, and by connection the anticipation of the prequels, defined a very large part of my adolescence.

And now . . . well.  I don’t need to nit-pick what was wrong with them here.  If you’re still not sure, Mr. Lucas, get right over to Red Letter Media’s site and watch the three reviews there.  He sums up everything and says it all better than I could have hoped to.

Do you see the problem here?  I am someone who spent countless hours not only watching your classic movies and reading the books, but discussing the trivia and in-universe hypothetical situations with other fans (and plenty of non-fans).  Then you answer every childhood dream I could have ever had by moving forward with those three new movies to complete the story, and everything seemed perfect in the world.  Everything that I said my adolescence was like prior to the Fall of 1998 when the first trailer for The Phantom Menace was released–first online and then before the Will Smith/Gene Hackman spy thriller Enemy of the State–was intensified exponentially, day after day, until I cheered with the crowd at the 12:01 showing (at which I was 3rd in line, by the way) at the top of my lungs when those yellow letters appeared on the screen and a few seconds later we saw words scrolling that we had not yet seen before in that context, except in our oldest and wildest dreams . . .

Episode I

And then the movie, George.  The movie.  Like I said, I liked it at the time, but it had no lasting power.  Each subsequent movie punched the fanboy in me in the gut a little harder.  Now here I am, six years after the last one came out (has it really been that long?) and I couldn’t really give two hoots about Star Wars.  Oh sure, I can still discuss it, but I like nerd and pop culture trivia discussions.  I can still sit through the old movies once in a while, especially with friends, but I like good movies (and they really are good, George).  I still like many Star Wars video games, but that’s really just because I like video games and a decent amount of the games based on or inspired by your film.  I plan on someday finally reading the Timothy Zahn book trilogy, but at this point that’s because I like reading and I own them.  But the true excitement that Star Wars gave me all those years ago is completely gone.  There were other things I loved back then, too, and coming across them or discussing them still give me warm feelings.  But not Star Wars.  Star Wars is essentially dead to me.

It was those movies.  Those movies and then that last kick-in-the-balls The Clone Wars animated movie.  That’s what did it.  So much of what was great about the original movies was knowing that the story of episodes I-III was going to be completely amazing, but what we got was pure crap.  And the part that hurts the most is not that “it turns out the story wasn’t that great after all,” but that the story COULD had have been great if you’d just TRIED to make it make sense instead of filming your first drafts.

Do you see?  YOU ruined it for me, George.  Everything that Star Wars was to me is now nearly completely lost.  The blood is on your hands.  You made those movies, you completely ran the entire creative process, you have no one else to blame for their awfulness and their devastating impact.  My Star Wars fandom and obsession is GONE.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.  I’m so glad it’s over, and if it took three terrible movies to finally snap me out of my daze, so be it.  I’m on the other side now and I’m loving my freedom.  I’ve seen guys over 30–heck, over 25–that despite everything are still completely in love with Star Wars, and it’s pathetic.  I’m not one of them anymore.  Sure, I can still carry on a conversation with them, but I’m not one of them.  Star Wars is officially just a “thing,” something that exists.   I cannot say with confidence that had you done the prequels well that I would be where I am, but things as they are, I know what got me here, and I’m glad it did.

You’re not entirely off the hook, especially after Indiana Jones 4, but I felt you should be given some recognition for inadvertently rescuing this deeply obsessed geek.  Once again, thank you.

Now quit making movies.

Five Non-Original Movies I Want to See Made

You’ve heard it all before, over and over again.

“Hollywood doesn’t have any new ideas!”

“It’s all the same stuff!”

“I liked Avatar better when it was called Dances With Wolves / Pocahontas / The Last Samurai / Fern Gully.”

“ANOTHER remake of a classic 80′s movie?  Why ruin that one, too?”

I tend to agree over all.  A modern take on a nostalgic television show is fun cinema; well-done movies based on characters once thought to be un-filmable are awesome; wiping away poorly-done franchises and starting anew is like a breath of fresh air; any one of those movies that are good are worth wanting to see a sequel from (when the story supports it).  But they can all get dramatically overdone.

It’s part of how “Hollywood” works.  The film industry isn’t first and foremost an artistic medium; it’s an industry–a business–that seeks to find customers the same way Amazon and Honda seek to find customers.  “What do people want?  Give them that!”  Sad, really, because unlike Amazon and Honda, movie producers aren’t very good at figuring out what people actually want.

Or maybe they are, and people are just idiots.

But where 20 years ago the idea of remaking a classic show was fun, and ten years ago the idea of a movie for every superhero or 80′s cartoon you could dream of was mind-blowing . . . it’s all gotten really old.  I’m mildly excited about the Avengers movie next year, and appreciate the way they’ve worked up to it, but it feels five years too late.  Rebooting Spider-Man is shameful.  Of all things, The Karate Kid did NOT need to be retold (I’d joke that Back to the Future is next, but I would not put that past them).  And why in the world couldn’t they let Pirates of the Carribean be a surprisingly decent movie without sequels?  Or FOUR movies?

I know that original ideas are risky in a business where a small film budget would feed an entire third-world country for a decade (think about that the next time you go to see a crappy romantic comedy), so I’m going to propose some films I’d like to see made based on other material that aren’t simply raping the same old corpses.  Please forgive my graphic imagery.  Let’s begin.

The Wizard of Oz

Blasphemy right off the bat, right?  You’re probably conjuring comparisons to the  new Willy Wonka movie, or Alice in Wonderland (both Burton films . . . hmm . . . okay, I declare that neither Johnny Depp nor Tim Burton are allowed within 100 feet of this movie).  But you’re forgetting about how amazing the new True Grit was, or how fun Ocean’s 11 is.  You’re also probably not thinking about how greats such as The Ten Commandments and Scarface are technically remakes, too.

But Wizard of Oz?  Judy Garland is as synonymous with Dorothy as Julie Andrews is with Mary Poppins, Stallone is with Rambo, Mark Hamill with Luke Skywalker, or *cough* Schwarzenegger is with Conan the Barbarian.  Yet I think this could be great, even though no matter how well it’s done, some people will act as if whoever the director is has tried to rewrite the Bible.  Actually, I think they’d be less concerned about the Bible.

How to do it:

They should add as little as possible to the story, and return to the book as the primary source.  Drop the songs, too.  I guess already the comparisons to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are opening up, but bare with me.
They should NOT make the story dark or gritty; nor should they leave it with a for-kids-only cheesy, cartoony air.  Make it a true family film–one the kids can enjoy but one mom and dad and teens and young adults and child-free advocates can all get through without rolling their eyes once.  In other words, don’t overdo it, but don’t be afraid that the little ones might get scared.  That’s life.

They should bring back parts like the four jumping across the river, and the Lion rushing his friends through the poppies.  Put the green glasses on the characters when they’re in the emerald city, and bring the magical hat back that controls the flying monkeys (and thus making the monkeys neutral at worst, not evil).  Include the porcelain village and the headbutting dudes, and the other parts not in the old movie.  Mention the four corners of Oz, discuss the surrounding desert.  The only things that should be added or changed are parts to transition better between scenes, as the book feels rather disjointed from chapter to chapter.  And in the end, it wasn’t all a dream.  Let Judy keep that plot change.
They should NOT add useless and boring subplots.  Like scenes of the family of the Wizard when he still lived in America, or cut-aways to the all-community search for Dorothy back in Kansas.  Stick with the original point of the story–if it’s too short and needs to be expanded (unlikely), then do that by fleshing out the four main characters.  Make sure it comes across, unlike in the old movie, that Dorothy’s three companions all had what they sought all along.  Don’t waste time on back stories of the munchkin village.

Most importantly–make NO inferences that Wicked is canon.  At all.  Have your own opinion of that book/play, but honestly I say that the whole “The bad guy’s actually misunderstood and the good guy is actually spoiled, arrogant, and manipulative” storyline is over-done and contrived.  Moving on.

They should cast an actual young girl in the role of Dorothy, instead of a teenager with a golden voice.  The Tin Woodsman (yes, you’d need to call him that so people can distance this film from the classic) would need to be a guy in a suit (but a really good mask, maybe CGI–no silver facepaint).  The Lion will likely be CGI, but the Scarecrow would probably work well as some kind of puppet.  With CGI when necessary.
They should NOT take the George Lucas approach and do everything on a blue soundstage and CGI even the munchkins.  They especially should not even toy with the Robert Zemeckis ping-pong-balls-on-quality-actors method. They should take the Peter Jackson approach and do everything as low-fi as possible unless it absolutely won’t work without more current technology and methods.  (But that’s not a Wizard of Oz thing, really, that’s an every special effects movie ever thing).  They also should not ignore how awful Aslan looks in the Narnia movies–so watch that.

Dragonlance: The Chronicles Trilogy

One of the biggest issues I’ve had with the types of “geek” movies that have come out non-stop for the last 10+ years is that they’re really only focused on material from a few genres.  Mostly superhero comics.  Beyond that, 80′s Saturday morning nostalgia–most of which, let’s be honest–would work well as a superhero comic (and many have).  But there’s one genuine nerd genre that’s almost completely ignored:

Fantasy.

It was my main one from middle school all through high school, too.  “But they made Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and now they’re making The Hobbit!” you say.  Oh, absolutely.  And they’re great (mostly).  But LOTR and Narnia are like the Batman and Superman of Fantasy.  They’re the big names, the genre definers.  What I want now are the Iron Mans, the Green Lanterns, the Watchmen.  Those lesser-known-by-the-general-masses-but-still-completely-awesome stories.

Also, there’s something that both Tolkien and Lewis don’t have nearly enough of–

Freaking Dragons

Dragons are what any sane geek loves most about the Fantasy genre.  Only Tolkien and Lewis can get away with such a low dragon-to-fantasy ratio.

Don’t–I repeat DO NOT–start thinking about crap like that Dungeons & Dragons movie from a decade ago, and don’t immediately think of Dragonheart, either (though you are allowed to say, “I am the last one!” to your heart’s content).  Where the former is so baffling-ly bad you question the IQ of those behind it, the latter is FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.  It out-dates Titanic.  A guy I had an adult conversation with last week was finishing up kindergarten then.  I guess there was Reign of Fire, too . . . but that movie was so forgettable that I added this sentence in a week after finishing this post.  With as far as special effects technology has come since 1996, I feel anyone who likes an exciting movie should start lobbying for more dragons.  And what better place to start than Dragonlance?  It’s still only a slight step into obscurity from LOTR, heavily story- and character-based, and lots of great visual and action potential.

They should grow a pair and do it as three movies with a full-scale production and huge budget with the best special effects they can muster.
They should NOT accept CGI that looks like it belongs in the lava scene from Aladdin.

They should focus on story and character.
They should NOT  let the special effects take over.  What makes a great movie great and worth watching over again is story and good characters.  It’s why Spider-Man 2 was great and memorable, where Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was not.  Dragonlance has those things, but I can see them being looked over far to easily in favor of cheap thrills.

They should make a tasteful trailer that hints at story and teases with known, key scenes.
They should NOT do that crap with thumping dance music and quick-fade cuts to a heartbeat and shots of Goldmoon’s inevitable skimpy outfit.

They should NOT cast a woman as Tasslehoff.

They should move quickly lest we hungry fans be bombarded with more crap like this or this.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

This is where I shift from desperate movie and geek culture fan to “stuff that Braden would really just like to see.”

Over my most recent bout of unemployment, I took full advantage of living one block from a library branch and read a ton of stuff.  One book I read was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a fact that still baffles me not only because I read the whole thing but because it’s currently my favorite novel.  The thing is though, there’s never been a large-scale production film made on it since 1927.  There’s been some independent films and a made-for-TV movie back in 1987, but nothing that’s as memorable as a movie based on this book should be.

It would be a pretty daring feat to make this movie, though.  Being a 160-year-old story based around a controversial social structure (to put it lightly), it’s been twisted and abused and deformed by all sides involved.  Many black Americans have rejected it because of the tired stereotypes it started, and because of the softening and twisting to the characters in “popular culture” done since the end of the Reformation.  Many white Americans have rejected it because they refuse to believe slavery was ever as bad as the book actually insists it was.  Others avoid it at all costs because they either find it too controversial, or they were forced to read it in high school and are still bitter.

I’ve only seen small clips of two of the movies made (the 1927 silent film and the 1976 independent film, both of which you can find in their entirety on YouTube), and then I’ve read the Wikipedia section on the 1987 movie, and while the 1987 one seems to be far more accurate, the makers of that film bragged about leaving out scenes like when Elisa skips across the ice on the Ohio River.  Why would you leave that out?

They should tell the story as it was meant to be told, exactly as it’s told in the book, with the message it’s had for 160 years.
They should NOT water it down to appease those that still try to suggest that slavery wasn’t all that bad.  Nor should they toss in parallels to civil rights or gay rights or modern social agendas.  Nor should they alter any characters to avoid “stereotyping” black or southern Americans, since those stereotypes were set after (and because of) this story.

They should leave in every exciting scene, and every emotional scene, and every challenging scene.  Let audiences experience a STORY and not just a message, yet not walk away forgetting the impact this story had on America.

Maybe it’s idealistic, but I see a great production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin being a wonderful exercise in racial unity between blacks and whites.  Maybe that’s silly.  Maybe.

Final Fantasy VI

Something that everyone knows has never been done well is the video game movie.  The big problem with them is that the source material doesn’t lend well to interesting movies.  Games are mostly about action or thinking about strategy in some fashion, and it’s hard to get that to translate well to film.  And in the event that there IS a story to tell, rest assured that some arrogant Hollywood exec is going to screw it up.  So why do I wish for this one?

The story of Final Fantasy VI (originally renamed Final Fantasy III for its American release) is one of my favorite stories of all time.  It’s very Star Wars-esque with hints of Jason Bourne and even Batman . . . but really that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  There’s so much there.  The whole plot taken out of the hunting for treasure chests, bonus side quests, level grinding, and long boss fights could fill an (interesting) two-and-a-half hour movie easily.  I’d bet you actually would have to do two films.

Hey, if The Hobbit can do it, so can Final Fantasy VI.

There’s so much character development that would need to be done it’s insane . . . because you could only reduce Umaro, Gogo, and Mog to bit parts or cameos.  Strago could play a smaller part, as could Gau, but Relm is important as (spoiler alert) it would definitely need to be revealed that Shadow is her father and we would need to care.  But Cyan and Setzer have very moving stories that need full attention.  Then you have the most important ones: Locke, Terra, Edgar, Sabin, and Celeste.  They carry the biggest part of the plot.  But hey, I’ve said before that character carries a good movie, and this would need that.

They’d just need to be careful that Kefka isn’t an alternate version of The Joker.  That could be very easy to mess up.

The biggest problem, honestly, would be what to name it.  You couldn’t reasonably call it Final Fantasy VI.  There’s no 1-5, and as much as I love FFI, FFIV, and FFV, and enjoy FFII and FFIII, I don’t want to sit through movies based on those just to get to this one.

Wow.  The more I think about this, the more I think it would absolutely work.  The writers don’t have to fill in a story to make up for the loss of all the gameplay time.  The characters are deep and moving.  The plot is interesting and engaging.

I call dibs!

A Three-and-a-Half Hour Biopic on Chicago

Haha!  I thought of this originally as a joke, but of course now I think it’s awesome.  Rock/Music biopics don’t typically fail, critically or commercially, but they can be awkward and jumpy.  I think, first of all, we all need to plan to spend a large portion of our afternoon at the theater when going to see a rock biopic of any nature.

That said, I’m willing to bet one could make a really awesome movie based on Chicago, but for a band with a nearly-45-year history, and just over 20 of it really interesting, you need to pick a smaller section to focus on.  I think it would be best to focus on the span from just before their formation in 1967 to right when they make it back on top of the charts again in 1982 with the release of Chicago 16.   It’s perfect.   You’ve got humble beginnings, existing for music, pop chart success, struggles with pop chart success, sacrificing art for pop chart success, climaxing at the accidental suicide of guitarist Terry Kath, falling out of favor with the music-listening public, and then climbing back on top.  Sure, there’s another 8 years, at minimum, that’s interesting to tell, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.  And that gives it a happy ending–but you could do the last scene and last shots at a huge, sold-out arena as they play “Hard to Say I’m Sorry/Get Away,” and their faces are filled with an unmistakable mix of relief and joy, plus an uneasy caution.

I say the best way to do the music is to take the Walk the Line route, and let the actors sing the parts.  The trickier part is getting them to play the instruments . . . you can’t fake musical mastery like all those guys had/have.  Well, no mountain worth climbing is easy.

. . . man, that’s a good idea.

Dibs again!

How Being Lazy Got Me Where I Am Today

Five years ago today I set out on my life’s second-greatest adventure.  The first is getting married, in case you didn’t figure that out on your own.  But on August 2, 2006, I left my college town and home of four years, Carbondale, Illinois, for Seattle, Washington.

Ahh, home. Well--"home" is actually about seven miles back and to the left of where this photo was taken. But I'm sure you knew what I meant.

It’s a pretty big deal to me that I’m here at all.  I could bore you for a long time and discuss how there was a time when I had so much uncertainty about my future that I was kind of afraid I’d end up in some small Illinois town for the rest of my life.  (No hate if that’s where you are and prefer it–it’s just that I really didn’t).  But that wasn’t what God had for me–turns out I just had to listen to him and take some risks.

What’s interesting is how I ended up being here in the first place.  I sometimes wonder if there were a single, seemingly trivial event or action in my past that set me on the path to not only moving to Seattle, but getting married to my wife.  For a while I thought it might have been if I’d not heard punk rock in the summer of 1995 . . . but I might have heard it and loved it at a later time.  Or maybe if I’d gotten a car other than my Mazda 626 in January 2002 . . . but who knows what car I would have ended up with otherwise?  It all seems like I was headed this way no matter what–but the other day a memory struck me and I realized that my entire present hinged on a single moment of laziness and apathy over thirteen years ago.

Early in the summer 1998 I was at Lincoln Land Community College taking a series of placement tests so I could get signed up for classes.  I wrote an essay and did some basic math and answered some science questions and probably some on history.  The last test I had to do was algebra.  Well, I was kind of tired of taking tests, you see.  I had an unlimited amount of time for each question presented to me by the computer, and I had the option to re-do any question before completing the test, and I may have even been told if I got an answer right or wrong when I submitted it.  The point is that this should have been an easy test for anyone that knows how to do algebra (which I did).  But I was bored and feeling lazy and wanted to get home to probably play video games or something, so I just selected random answers for the last two-thirds of the questions.  I got most, if not all, of those wrong.

The result of this act of impatience and laziness was monumental.

I was given a class schedule of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., no breaks.  I was placed in a zero-credit math class due to my performance on that assessment test.  The math class was at 11.  In this math class, I became better acquainted with a guy named  Aaron, who was the saxophone player in a local, Christian ska band.  Within a week or two, I also met a guy nicknamed “Skippy,” who I got to know that semester as well.

Well Aaron asked Skippy and I if we wanted to play in a swing band he was trying to start up.  Skip also played saxophone, and trombone was my primary instrument at the time.  We both said yes.  By the end of that semester, the band we formed had dissolved but a strong friendship between Skip and myself had formed–so strong that my circle of friends had almost completely changed by that point from what it was the previous summer (high school friends, mostly) to people I met through Skip or people I met at college, along with Skip. Point being, my social life, interests, and activities after that semester would be shaped because I was friends with him.

Around nine or ten months after that band fell apart, Skip borrowed a bass guitar from a mutual friend and started playing.  He called me on his first night with it and said, “We’re starting a punk band.”  I had been playing a little bit of guitar for a few months and was sure I could handle power chords in punk songs, so I claimed guitar and vocals for myself, and then mentioned another friend of mine to Skip that played guitar that could join us (named Aaron, but not the Aaron from before).   The three of us started the band the fall of 1999, had a drummer by early 2000, and the band came apart early 2001.  But the four of us in the group were still good friends.

So good, in fact, that Aaron and Skip simultaneously decided to attend Southern Illinois University at Carbondale starting the spring semester of 2002, and they made sure they were roommates.  When the fall semester of 2002 came around, it was my time to move on to a University.  I had picked SIUC precisely because Aaron and Skip were already going there.  I originally wanted to go any place OTHER than SIUC.  Carbondale is next to Murphysboro, which is where my dad’s entire family lives.  Sure, I love all of them, but I originally wanted to attend school in a place I wasn’t familiar with and had no connections to.  To start fresh.  However, being the social person I am, of course I followed friends when that opportunity presented itself.  And almost as if to secure my decision, I had some serious money-for-school problems arise by the summer of 2002, so it was a bonus that I had grandparents and extended family that lived in the area.  But the decision to attend SIUC began with my friends going there, and the fact that I still got to go despite money issues was secured by the fact that I had family in the area.

Well, the fall semester started and–skipping the gory details–my friendships with Aaron and Skip didn’t survive the first few weeks of school.  It was a tumultuous four months with lots of uncertainty, but by the start of 2003′s spring semester, I was fully involved with a local church in Carbondale now called “The Vine.”

By the next fall semester (2003, still), I had met a pretty young lady at my church named Dona, and we started becoming friends.  Right about the same time, the lead pastor of The Vine announced he felt led by God to start a new church in Seattle.  By the following summer, he and a large team of people from our church moved to the Pacific Northwest.  Not quite a year-and-a-half later, I felt strong conviction from God to move to Seattle, too, and be part of that church.  As I said before, I moved on August 2, 2006 and arrived 2 days later.

Nearly eleven months later, under almost entirely independent circumstances, Dona also moved to Seattle.  We were engaged just over a year later and married two-and-a-half months after that.

So there you have it.  I am married to the woman of my dreams and live in Seattle all because I was lazy one summer day at a community college and didn’t feel like finishing an un-timed test.  Had I finished that test honestly, I guarantee I would have passed it.  I knew algebra well enough to get most of them right, and those placement tests weren’t designed to be extremely harsh.  Therefore I wouldn’t have had any reason to get to know (the first) Aaron any better, and wouldn’t have met Skippy under the same circumstances, if at all, and wouldn’t have been close enough to Skip to be the first person he called when he wanted to start a band.  Therefore Skip and (the second) Aaron would very likely not have met and wouldn’t have been roommates at SIU, an arrangement that provided encouragement for me to follow them there.  Had I not ended up in Carbondale, I would have not started attending Vine, thus not being around for, knowing of, or even caring about the church plant in Seattle.  And I submit to be the most important: I would I have met my wife.  Funny how that works.

Oh, sure, you could argue that all of that stuff would  have happened one way or another because it was God’s plan, and I would agree . . . but it’s fun to look at it this way, and to make a case about laziness having a positive impact on someone’s life.