Enders Game..

[sleepy]

Is the theme music for "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Jaws" satisfactory?

EDIT: I just realized that I might be taken the wrong way...
I only mean to ask, Is the theme music for "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Jaws" satisfactory?
I'm not trying to be political, contrary, or clever.
It's only about "the potato chips".

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Damn, sleepy... what the hell is the theme music to To Kill a Mockingbird? I guess, since I didn't notice it when I saw it, I would have to say it was quite satisfactory. Jaws, of course, is easy to remember. I hate to be a "meat-and-taters" average-Joe filmgoer, but I always like John Williams' scores. At the very least, he's got a hell of a batting average. I mean, any composer would be lucky to write one soundtrack that becomes a cultural touchstone like the theme to Jaws did. But then Williams wrote the Star Wars score. And then the "Darth Vader March" (as I've always called it) from Empire. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, with the possible exception of the Beatles, there is no other artist whose music is better known on a global scale.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

@bill,
i read somewhere that paxton ad-libbed that line and they left it in. neat, huh?

...

i don't remember those facts about card, whoa.

OTOH, he would probably stand out a lot more to me if he didn't fit so squarely with huge masses of other redneck, delusional americans. like people from an older era who can't or won't adjust to the present reality. thus, my dislike has mostly turned to a mixture of pity and indifference... at least, across sufficient cosmic distance, that is.

...

i did manage to enjoy battlefield earf a lot as a teenager. for some reason i never had the urge to follow up with any other of his other bullshit sci-fi, and that was long before i learned what a manipulative, conniving trainwreck he was.

(why isn't strikethrough BBC enabled here, dammit?!)

"and where the hell was i, anyway?"


@shockman,
thanks. it was some badly needed insights in to relationships, as the case may be. much of my neural bandwidth has been tied up in such problems since december when i first tangled with my opposite.

whatever doesn't kill me adds to my magnificent collection of scar tissue.

 

[Shockman]

Well, now you can no longer claim ignorance, Shocky!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/15/orson-scott-card-racist-obama_n_3762891.html

Ha! What a diseased clown! End of the game, indeed! Or, as Bill Paxton would say, "Game over, man!"
Game Over Man, GAME OVER! - YouTube



I guess I should be completely honest and state that it would be untrue for me to claim that I have never read, nor ever would read, a sci-fi book written by a paranoid psychopath. I got through about 50 pages of L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth before I chucked it in the trash.

I don't know what you're getting at. If it is only that I did not know this about him, you are right. I don't know if he was like that 30 years ago, but like I said, I did not read his books and did not know of him then. Maybe he was raped by a man. That would probably turn me the same way.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

I want to give you the last word, but,

2) I don't know what you are talking about, but if it is about improvement in health then I am glad about it.

in conclusion, That'll do, Pig.

I think that was my fault, Shocky. This post you made followed the one I made and I thought you were referring to what I said about Card being a world-class weirdo... but you were actually responding to what Nic said. Well... I know I've got all this straight. I hope you do, because there will be a test on Monday.

 

[sleepy]

Thank you Ruby. :)

Elmer Bernstein took credit for Mockingbird. The theme represents innocent childhood. I remember two fingers spontaneously in a single pass on a piano on a farm in '62, and I could not remember how I did it immediately afterwards, so I fumbled around with it, which is where the rest of it came from. I think...

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I didn't even see Jaws in '75. I was recovering from hepatitis B from late '74, staying home and pounding the piano. But I knew the story and the three main characters and to use the camera as the shark's POV, not to see any shark until later in the movie, in 1971.
The plot for the movie came before the book, from my high school days.

They got the original Bruce the Shark at an auto wrecking yard about two miles from here, also in Sun Valley, Ca where I am living, though I've never stopped in to see it.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370664

In 1971 I was in Summer School commercial art class. The teacher was Mr. Norton. He also worked in the set dept. at Warner Bros.
The image attachment is not from Jaws. It is a promo shot from the Cinerama documentary, "Blue Water, White Death" (1971).
Mr. Norton had a pile of magazines which we used for class projects.

We were told to Explode a picture. Cut it up and repaste the parts to a construction paper to make a new design or statement, and I found this image in an issue of *I think* Look Magazine. I preserved the jaws and the eye and cut the body up into moray strips around those features on blue construction paper.

I got an "A-" for it, and I started to think about a story that would make one hell of a horror movie.

In the VHS Anniversary release, one of the video extras is by Spielberg discussing the film, and he is sitting in front of a poster of this image which is from a totally different movie.

In '71 my brother and me were on the freeway and had a brush with a tractor trailer, and I thought about a horror plot involving being chased relentlessly by a mad trucker, with a sound loop at the climax of a half-speed recording of the tortured scream of a dinosaur.

I don't talk to my family much about my ideas anymore...

 

[sleepy]

So I ran off this tune in a single pass. This was on the dairy farm in Pennsylvania.
We moved back there from California in May, 1962, and I was allowed to skip the last month of second grade.

Time and memory and one's imagination can often play very bad tricks against one's certainty, and I really wasn't sure when I played those very similar lines of melody.
The film came out in 1962, but when? Before or after I took a spin on the piano several months after returning to the farm? We had no piano in California at that time.

I just looked around again and found some new information that wasn't available to me until now. Wikipedia list the release date as December 1962 (in the facts box on the right).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird_(film)

And earlier I found this unusual entry at imdb.com for the film's awards.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056592/awards

Academy Awards, USA 1963

Nominated
Oscar Best Music, Score - Substantially Original
Elmer Bernstein http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000930?ref_=ttawd_awd_8

Substantially Original?? I don't remember any of the soundtrack being anything but original. Except for that theme which I have no legal proof or reason to claim as my own. But I still remember creating it.

Thank you for putting up with my troubles. The locals still aren't talking and there are days when I feel like crawling under a rock about it.
This hopefully will be the last interruption from me.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Hey! Elmer Bernstein! He is a composer near and dear to my heart! I don't know the number of times my eyes ran over his name as I listened to the Animal House soundtrack (again and again and again...)! I had a serious Belushi problem in the late '70s, as it was also near-impossible to pry the Blues Brothers' Briefcase Full of Blues off my turntable. When I chance to hear it today, it's hard to suppress a chuckle. The record now sounds like a glorified karaoke project by two guys whose main apparent talent on the record is their passion rather than their singing. There! That's a diplomatic way of saying Belushi was a pretty bad singer! But that record certainly opened up my ears to a lot of great music by the original artists.

 

[sleepy]

Yo! Sam & Dave were truly great.

EDIT: You know what? I never saw it. THe Blues Bros. cut a separate album with Soul Man, Messin' With the Kid, and it was all over L.A. radio.

Me, I was broke, busted and hounded by the locals like a hazing. And after a divorce and 8 years gone, Jerry reappeared and was walking around claiming to be "Jim Close" with absolutely no knowledge of Jerry. Bizarre.
His son Mark and his Mother moved into our apartment complex after we left the old apartment in Burbank and after Jerry's divorce. Never saw Jerry around here until the hazing.
His son Mark is/was a good friend, 5 years younger than me, whom I haven't seen since he gave me a ride in his new pickup truck in '78, and he went on to work behind the scenes of the films, "Back to the Future II & III", "Jurassic Park", and others. In '78 he moved back in with his Father after Jerry's job prospects picked up.

Given the harsh hazings, I haven't been too keen on watching a frat movie that I may have suggested... ... ...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

for moi twas the blues bros soundtrack album. for some reason my buddies didn't mind it being played over and over again on board game nights. that and "learning to crawl." those tolerant bastards.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Well, I only listened to the soundtrack about half as many times as I did the first album, which means somewhere in the 300s. Is that The Pretenders Learning to Crawl you reference? I have intimate knowledge of that one. I certainly feel Time, the Avenger stalking me!

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

oh yes, they're the great pretenders, ala the chrissie hynde show. from nearby lebron jamesville.

losing one guitarist per tour due to drug overdose is acceptable, but two is a little OVER THE LINE, smokey...?

 

[LeeVanCleef]

LOL! Yes, it is! I'm right there with you Nic... had that album memorized! I have had two friends who had a Brush with Greatness concerning Chrissie Hynde and, it turns out, she might be a little batshit! While a friend of mine was living in NY, he met this girl that worked for the Pretenders'... publicist, manager? Anyway, he had a hand-written note from Chrissie telling him to stop bothering her employees. The note was hilariously batshit, something along the lines of "Quit fucking bothering my employees when they're supposed to be working, or I will kill you! HAHA, just kidding! Seriously, leave them the fuck alone!" Another friend of mine reached her during a radio call-in show in 1986 to question her decision to drop drummer extraordinaire Martin Chambers from the group (as I, too, did, safely, in my home, where she couldn't get to me). If I remember correctly, he was reasonably polite when he asked the question. Chrissie's answer, on the radio, started out with the words "You listen here, boy!" The rest of the answer was equally... enthusiastic, stating that she decides who's going to drum for her group. Behavior like this wouldn't endear me to most artists... but she's Chrissie fucking Hyndes! BYW, Nic, if you haven't heard their 2008 release, Break Up the Concrete, you need to! Beautifully raw and stripped down, typically great lyrics... she will never get back to those fantastic recordings on the first album, but goddammit if she isn't going to try! I'll admit... I've never seen this video before, and, sure, it might be a little blurry but, I'm pretty sure that, even this many years down the road, I still want to pick up Chrissie and run off into the woods with her. Of course, she'd end me before I could... I think that's part of the attaction!

The Pretenders - "Boots of Chinese Plastic" Shangri-La Music - YouTube

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

veddy interesting...!


you know, my complaint with people like her and delores o'riordan and many others who are fantastic singers is that they often tend to flatter themselves unnecessarily on their song-writings skills. meaning, they seem to lose the ability to discern which of their stuff is worth publishing and which is worth holding back on.

The Pretenders - I`m not in love - YouTube

i'd rather see them improve already polished songs, like that.


on another tangent, paul mccartney is a slightly-different kind of mystery to me. i mean, to go from songwriting legend (beatles) to above-average songwriter (wings and stuff) to embarrassingly bad songwriter (mid-80's and beyond) rather confounds me. too many drugs and fish and chips, perhaps?

 

[sleepy]

Jesus Criminy! That Chrissie sounds like she worked at Warner Bros. Records.

What about this gal? Care to try? Separated at birth??


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</center>

 

[sleepy]

Oh No Man. Macca is a vegetarian.

 

[sleepy]

Try this one

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[Isaac Sauvage]

meh, s'okay. thank you.

 

[StevOz]

Chrissie Hynde, she just exuded sex appeal, especially this clip, it was well yeah, when I did have brass in my pocket! :)

The Pretenders - Brass in pocket (HD 16:9) - YouTube

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

it's her voice that does it for me. half wail / half hot and bothered. sort of makes what she actually looks like superfluous. :)

 

[StevOz]

Got to agree on the seductive voice, though at the same time there was always the allure for me of that body.

Actually my best friend of the time was into his Suzie Q

SUZI QUATRO - DEVIL GATE DRIVE !! HD - YouTube


Got to say, none to bad at all and I was a roller-boy, with my own custom roller-skates back then.

Wished I still had those skates now, getting chased through the tiled marbled plated malls in the city after hours by the fat security blokes what a buzz..power slide+..:)

 

[sleepy]

Were those custom inline skates?

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Ah, good ol' Suzi Quatro! The rest of the world knew her as one rockin' chick. America knew her for that wussy "Stumbin' In" song. And her role as Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days. I was going to post a clip of her on the show, but it's just way too embarrassingly bad. If you wanna lose 7 minutes of your life, it's on YouTube. It's amazing that, the more Happy Days progressed in age, the more Fonzie looked like a time-traveler to a crappy 1970s sitcom. You got to give the "brass cojones" award to the producer who asked "can we just stop mentioning the 1950s in the TV show and cast that dreamy Scott Baio who looks as 1950s as Farrah Fawcett-Majors?"

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

haha that was real cute, steve. shades of pat benetar and joan jett.


you know when i saw the name, the first person who popped in to my brain case was...
Siouxsie & the Banshees - Kiss Them For Me [480p] - YouTube


i dig that phil spector wall of sound thing, although i'm not sure if they used it on most of their tracks.

 

[faralos]

Ah good ol' Wendy O of the Plasmatics was one tough gal
and as for that movie about the crazed trucker
it is called Duel and stars Dennis Weaver