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I don't know what it is, but I just can't stand Bean. Maybe it is that the character seems to slip around a lot -- sometimes simply oblivious, sometimes wantonly cruel (and often cruel to children). (Yes, he's basically a child in a grown-up body, but I don't find this scenario particularly interesting.) Maybe it was the scene in the Bean movie where he destroys the Whistler's Mother painting. I actually felt sick to my stomach watching it (and not because I was laughing so hard). The animated version is a bit more tolerable, though I wouldn't seek it out. On the other hand, I like Blackadder, particularly the 2-4 seasons. Blackadder can be plenty cruel in those, but the witty language makes up for a lot. Maybe I just can identify better with Blackadder who is reasonably intelligent, than with Bean, the apparent simpleton. Don't know, just know I don't enjoy it.

This has got to be a record for me at least -- I ended up leaving Dusty Groove with more money than when I started. I went in to sell a bunch of LPs and was very surprised when they offered me $130 for the lot. Of course, I did pick up a few things, including the soundtrack to Tati's Traffic (by Charles Dumont), some LPs by the Latin Jazz Quintet and Buddy Collette's Tanganyika. Nonetheless, they still owed me money, which is definitely a first.

I found used copies of Roach's Brown Sugar on the Water label and Tobacco Road by Jack McDuff.

I agree - I can't imagine all these actually making it to the screen - Ant Man, Namor? I did see Silver Surfer, so maybe there will be a galactic adventure after all. As far as the uniforms, well no wonder Doom felt left out. Now if only they had gone into space wearing their Fantastic Five costumes, then the world would have turned out so much better. (Again, a pretty ridiculous change to the basic story line.)

That's right. Who would ever need more than 10 or 20 of these new-fangled CDs I keep hearing about? In fact, I think we could all get by with, say, four copies of Kind of Blue. That way we'd all at least know who the bass player was.

Then I started thinking about Spiderman and Dr. Strange, since they did a cross-over or two. Dr. Strange have his own TV pilot in 1978 which I watched, and for some reason I thought he showed up once or twice in the Spiderman TV series, but I am probably mistaken. Anyway, scanning the web for confirmation of this, I came across this list of Marvel-based movies in development. It's sort of good news/bad news. Bad news for people who like serious movies. Good news for people who like superhero movies, though most of them won't be very good, and the sheer number will end up killing the trend for another 10 years or so. I think Dr. Strange does have promise as a movie, though hard to say it wouldn't be so watered down to avoid getting banned in the South that it would even be worth it. Same with Ghost Rider, though the studios somehow did put out Hellboy and that did ok.

I wasn't really planning on seeing this movie, and most of the reviews I've scanned have been fairly negative. Is it true that the Invisible Woman isn't able to make her clothes invisible and gets a complex over having to strip before using her powers? Does she eventually manage to turn her uniform invisible? Quite frankly, if this is true, it seems such a perversion (in several senses) of the comics that I wouldn't even rent the movie. She is definitely supposed to have the power to turn the things she is touching invisible. What might be watchable would be a cross-over between FF and Spiderman. They made many appearances together and always had a nice tension between whether FF would trust Spiderman, since in most early storylines he had such bad publicity. Maybe they need a successful FF sequel to show the franchise really has legs.

I read some X-Men as a kid, and liked it, but then when I thought about getting back into it, I found there were over a dozen lines of X-Factor, New Mutants, Wolverine, who knows what else. I'm a little bit of a completist, and realized I would go broke trying to buy all these titles, if I got back into it. So I didn't. What I still read sporadically -- Transmetropolitan Girl Genius Mr. X and other comics by Dean Motter

Guilty. I think I have managed to listen to everything in my collection once, but probably 40% I have listened to one time, 30% twice, and the remaining 30% I am more familiar with. On the other hand, I am not constantly on the prowl for CDRs either. Still, I was very grateful someone (not on this board) hooked me up with Hill's Dance with Death until it was rereleased.

Some people get shivers up their spine when we put music into boxes or talk about genres. I get shivers when I find people telling other what they can and cannot say on a jazz board, or that our self-censorship will somehow make a bit of difference to the bean-counters. Maybe Kevin is blowing something out of proportion and maybe not, but he has the right to post about it. Frankly, I never thought of buying jazz as a moral crusade. Finally, I don't interact much with musicians, but if I felt one had done me wrong or dissed me personally, hell no I wouldn't buy their stuff, even if it was Miles or Mingus. (Probably just as well I don't hang out with musicians.)

I don't think I have posted this before, but for those of you who grew up on Dungeons and Dragons and Dragon Magazine in particular, you might remember a certain cartoonist called Phil Foglio. While I have moved very far indeed from gaming, he's kept one foot in it and does lots of illustrations for fantasy card games. But he always did a few other projects on the side, including Buck Godot, a funny SF series, and the illustrations to many of the Myth Inc. novels by Robert Aspirin. His website is Studio Foglio Anyway, a few years back he and his wife started a new comic called Girl Genius, which I think is pretty clever and funny. I won't go into details, which you can find out for yourself, though basically it is about a quasi-Medieval Europe where "sparks" (mad scientists) are in charge. It's in a fairly new genre called gaslamp fantasy, though it reminds me a fair bit of the "Lord Darcy" fantasy series by Randall Garrett (haven't read those in ages). What's very cool is that they have started putting the old comics on line for free (though I do own them all already) and the new pages go up three times a week here: Girl Genius If you poke around you'll find there is even a link to a Yahoo group discussing the comic and offspins. The posts are generally amusing, but are made by people still very much in the gaming community.

I mentioned this on the Yourmusic thread, but it can go here as well. Yourmusic.com has both Consummation and Central Park North for $5.99 each. I'm still kicking myself (a little bit) for paying $10 for CPN at the B*%&rds.

Anyone know whether Monday Night! will be released as a single CD? I recall someone posting that MC says everything eventually gets rereleased. Second, if a CD issue isn't in the near (3 year) horizon, does the LP have as much reverb as some of the other dates? I would hope not, being a live (or "live") show, but don't have any way to verify. Thanks!

It's been a long time coming, but according to Ebert, Harold Lloyd's work will be coming out soon in a DVD package, including Safety Last, which I saw on television years ago. As far what's out there now, it is just the public domain films, with probably the best one from Kino called The Harold Lloyd Collection (Slapstick Symposium). Included in this Kino collection are the feature Grandma's Boy (1922), plus the shorts Bumping Into Broadway (1919), An Eastern Westerner (1920), His Royal Slyness (1921), Just Neighbors (1919), I Do (1918), and Number Please (1920). I probably will continue to rank Lloyd below Chaplin and Keaton, but it is great that this will be coming out, now that the Lloyd family has restored the films and gotten a deal they could live with.

Young or old, I wouldn't play music so loud you can hear it down the street and send the browsing public running for cover.

I'm going to have to clear out my queue, which is down to Mobley's Hi Voltage. I added Lewis/Jones Consummation (and am more than a little bummed they also have Central Park North, since I paid more this afternoon) and Peggy Lee's Black Coffee.

Great news! Best of luck with the new job.

When the last human checks out on planet earth. My thoughts and condolences as well. This is terrible. I haven't been in London a lot, but I almost always come through Kings Cross, so this definitely hits home for me. It really is an almost impossible dilemma -- really worse than air travel -- since to add the security that would prevent such bombings to the London (or NYC or Paris) undergrounds would make them all but unusable. But maybe some clever people will think up something.

I have found some great things there that were officially OOP at the time, like McLean's Demon Dance and Bout Soul. But I don't like going in nearly as much now that they have moved into the smaller space. I rarely find anything I want in the used CD section (I know, just wait until the next estate sale). But the clerks are pretty knowledgable. They do have a very large selection of box sets, jazz DVDs and jazz VHS tapes. Pretty much one of everything in print, and you won't find that most places. If I am looking for a Delmark CD, I almost always buy it there (sort of like buying direct from Mosaic when possible).

There was an omnibus with 4 Ambler novels in it that I read 5 or 6 years ago. I do remember Coffin was in there. It was pretty entertaining at the time, but I can't recall any of it now. Yes, a definite European flavor, sort of like The Third Man. At least one (maybe Coffin) has the narrator get sucked into this shadowy world, i.e. he doesn't start out as a spy. I think that was my favorite. Sorry I can't be more helpful, but the neurons aren't firing this afternoon.

Great list. I've read a bit by most of the writers mentioned. Actually it's interesting that Ray Bradbury came up because he is the other writer, other than Niffenegger, that really started me thinking on these lines. I just read The Cat's Pajamas, which is a recent collection of non-SF stories that span his entire writing career -- and the writing is really bad. So I'm a little worried to go back through some of his classic books. Would I find that the writing just isn't that great, but the ideas carry the books (fairly likely) or does he become a better writer when grappling with major ideas? Again, I am probably setting the bar quite high. Genre writing is generally pretty bad. So the first hurdle is 1) are the ideas interesting, then 2) do I care about the characters and is the dialogue at least somewhat plausible (and many of the writers I return to fall into this camp), then finally 3) can they really write well and approach a literary standard. Here we might demand that different characters actually speak differently from each other and letting plots unfold without being forced. I feel most SF writers (heck, most writers) stumble here. I do give extra points for writers who can convincely put together an entire alien civilization, which is the main reason for Cherryh and Le Guin being on my initial list. Zelazny is on there for Roadmarks and good use of mythic material in Jack of Shadows and Eye of Cat and a couple others. Actually, Ellison is one of the more literary SF writers, but he is usually lacking in the science fiction department with a few exceptions. I'm sort of on the fence with Philip K Dick. I typically don't find his characters convincing at all, and often his endings are whoa it was all a drug trip. But Man in the High Castle is great. I'll add some more as I think of them.

Perhaps a somewhat misleading title. I read tons of science fiction as a young adult and still indulge from time to time. I am often enthralled at the really interesting ideas embedded in science fiction novels, though some of them do end up being stupid retreads on the world mind concept or what have you. But much of the time, these are plot-driven works with fairly flat characters and dialogue. Not all the time of course. Anyway, I was struck about how Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife takes the science fiction convention of a time traveler and puts it into a literary framework. Margarat Atwood sometimes does this as well. Also, Dorris Lessing, though I am not terribly satisfied with her science fiction efforts. So I thought I would start a list of the science fiction authors that can really write well, in addition to grappling with interesting concepts. Ian McDonald Roger Zelazny Ursula LeGuin C. J. Cherryh - Wave without a Shore That's it for now. I really do like many authors not on the list (Asimov, Clarke, etc. etc. etc.) but they generally fall pretty short on a (fairly arbitrary) literary scale.

Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta This is a series of stories (fables really) told by international travelers all stranded because the Tokyo airport is snowed in. It's much closer to Boccaccio's Decameron than the Canterbury Tales, regardless of what the publisher's blurb says. The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (I went to school with her sister). This is a really engaging love story about a man who keeps slipping around in time, usually for just a couple of hours at a time, who keeps running into this young girl, who eventually becomes his wife. Once they are united in "the present," they struggle to find a way to keep him there. After this, I am going to read McEwan's Saturday, which is a meditation on Sept. 11 and has gotten really good reviews. Then I will read Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which was a runner up for the Booker Prize. I wasn't blown away by his previous novel numberninedream, but I've heard this is better. The opening scene is good at least. Anyway, this is a summer for more "serious" books.

Well, to hijack this thread a bit, on the Eurotrip DVD (don't ask), they have a special feature where they bootleg the boots. Sure, Zappa did the same thing, but the point here was not to clean up the bootlegs but to show how bad (and yet funny) some of the boots were with someone's head in the middle of the screen or someone going by to get popcorn.

I think it is awfully hard to win. The chains are really obnoxious and play a lot of rap, though Borders does keep the volume down. A lot of indy store clerks are still living out their music snob dreams from High Fidelity, so only play obscure punk or something equally awful with vocal yelping, but at very high volumes. Reckless Records in Chicago is particularly bad for this, as was one of my favorite* stores on Belmont (that closed last year). I suppose it won't be much of a problem, since there won't be more than one indy stores per city in another 5 years. 4 music stores in Lakeview/Lincoln Park alone closed in the last two years, and another one looks to be well on its way towards closing. * Very good selection in multiple genres despite the jerk clerks.