The Photo Has Been Changed

I'm disappointed, too. Little things, you know? They always disappoint you the most. Well, thankfully. I'd hate for the big things to start Hindenburging down on me. For example (little-things-wise, that is): I have been QUITE excited about the Edgar Rice Burroughs film coming out in the near future. I am, as many previous posts on this blog can testify, a very large Burroughs fan. By Issus! Not literally, that is. My bones are very small, part daschund, really. But my heart, boys and girls, my heart is very big for Burroughs. So when I heard that the director of Sin City had hired Frank Frazetta to be the art director for the John Carter film, I had all kinds of good thoughts. The man had obviously learned from Peter Jackson and was hiring a defining illustrator of the author to illustrate the film based on the author's book! But when I heard that the director had been dismissed, I did not continue thinking such good thoughts. Until I heard that the director of Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow had been hired on for the film! A man who clearly understands 1920's pulp fiction. Yay! And dismissed. Oh, no. And now Jon Favreau has taken over the reins of this film. Which will no longer be called A Princess Of Mars, but John Carter Of Mars. Which is actually the title of the last book in Burroughs' series set on Barsoom. They're already changing things, aren't they? And so I fear for this film.

"Der Erlkönig" + Franz Schubert I remember a lot of things about that one music history class I was required to take. I remember avoiding the dread-locked crowd in the back which collectively shouted their love for psychobilly at first-day introductions. Mostly I avoided them because I had said that I was listening to a lot of j-pop and I'd described it as being the exact opposite of psychobilly, which made every pair of black jeans in the back stare very hard. That class, though, overall, was a blast. It taught me to appreciate Henry Purcell all over again (my brother, with his mixes lovingly taped off CBC Radio, was the first to introduce me to Henry P), it taught me the whole thing about "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and it taught me that while Romantic classical music will forever own a part of my soul, abstract stuff like free jazz and scat simply never will. And one day, on a whim, the professor played Schubert's crushing piece of horrorpop, and it was like a gigantic anvil swinging around the fluorescent room, and the psychobilly crowd and the rest of us were entirely flattened by this enormous-nearly-shrieking presence that was the boy's terror of the elf king in this relentless song. That presence is still, to me, the ultimate inescapable nightmare, and the elf-king its terrible engine. I don't listen to j-pop even half as much as I once did. I still listen the hell out of this song, though.

And be careful. It's a mixtape destroyer, don't burn it. I warned you.