Weekend Reads: MST3K, The Boo Radleys, Sci-Fi Predictions, Understanding Chocolate & More
Recommended weekend reading material for February 22, 2020.
Here are some of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and enjoyable articles, blog posts, and reviews that I’ve read over the last week or so. They span a variety of topics and I hope they’ll make for some good weekend reading material.
Why has Mystery Science Theater 3000 remained so beloved for over three decades?
The casual irreverence, the willingness to mock every aspect of a movie from the title on down, the precise wording (“what it is they’re in that’s so deep”): Much of what would make MST3K an influential favorite can be found in that first episode, even before it begins its signature riffing or introduces the robot friends that will aid in the mockery. All it needs is an obscure reference only 10 viewers will get, but which those 10 viewers will really appreciate.
Unfortunately, Netflix decided to not renew MST3K for another season, but so long as we keep circulating the tapes, we’ll be alright.
Tim Brown — former bassist for The Boo Radleys (an excellent shoegaze/Britpop group in the early-to-mid ‘90s) — reflects on the band’s success.
Tim has fond memories of the band's big moments, not least their "biggest one" playing Glastonbury for the second time, this time on the main stage, with "tens of thousands of people going made for the hit, for Wake Up".
According to the article, some of the Boos are reunited to record new material to celebrate their 25th anniversary.
Related: My review of The Boo Radleys’ Wake Up!.
One of The Boo Radleys’ contemporaries in the shoegaze scene was Ride, who are celebrating their 30th anniversary by looking back their early days and inspirations.
We were insistent that there was no lead member and that we wanted the music to be the most important aspect of the band. An awful cliché when you look back, but it was important to us at the time.
We stretched this concept further by listing the song titles in a circle to hopefully give the impression that there was no lead track and that all four songs were also given equal billing. Besides, back then, the idea of putting ourselves on the cover filled us with horror.
Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan discusses the ideas leading up to her 2019 sci-fi vampire concept album, Lost Girls.
I had just finished a 10-year record deal on a major label and decided that I wanted to spend some time making movies and writing scripts and looking at the more visual side of things. So I came out to LA, fell in love, spent lots of nights driving around with the windows down smelling jasmine, looking at the sea. It was a very heady, intoxicating, summer-loving kind of romantic feeling that I had. And we went up to Santa Cruz — and I’m a big fan of the film The Lost Boys — and I just started forming this script around the themes of falling in love, but also what it would be to be a girl vampire living in LA and traveling around the city at night.
Related: Bat For Lashes’ “The Hunger” was one of my favorite songs of 2019.
How well did the science fiction of the ‘80s and ‘90s do when it came to predicting the realities of our current era?
Last year famously marked the moment when the setting of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi movie masterpiece Blade Runner (1982) slid from the future into the past — it was set in November 2019 — spawning dozens of hot takes and essays not unlike this one. But Blade Runner is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to science fiction movies and novels that depicted the then-near future of the 2020s. Seeing as how we are now unhappily ensconced in said 2020s, we have a chance to use hindsight to evaluate them. What did they get right, and what makes them now seem dated? Why? And what can we learn from the future forecasts about our now-present from the writers and speculators of the past?
Tackiness is generally seen as a bad thing, but in this article about Niagara Falls’ tourist traps, John Semley thinks otherwise:
[T]ackiness of the kind you’ll find — or used to find — on Clifton Hill proves memorable, even affecting, not just because of some knowing irony. It’s because, I think, it feels so lovingly and painstakingly handmade. Who cares that Pasquale Ramunno can’t nail the details of Bruce Springsteen’s half-agape mouth? What lingers is not the perfect resemblance to the Boss but the sculptor’s efforts. Something similar can be said of the dumpy mannequins of Movieland and even the enormous Whopper-gobbling Frankenstein’s monster. Their profound flaws are an index of the sloppiness of humanity. They are perfectly imperfect. And this is certainly preferable to the alternative.
Alto’s Adventure (along with its sequel, Alto’s Odyssey) is one of my favorite iOS games, and it recently celebrated its 5th anniversary. The founder of Snowman (the game’s developer) reflects on Alto’s milestone:
After some time had passed and we really got to soak in everything that had happened, we started feeling like Alto had become a bit more than just a mobile game; it was a place people visited to escape their reality, for many different reasons. One of these reasons was to seek out a moment of calm–a bit of relaxation after the end of a busy day. The more we thought about it, the more it felt like what we wanted to focus on moving forward.
Related: My review of Alto’s Odyssey.
Though she died in 2012, Whitney Houston is returning to the stage — as a hologram.
For the next part of her act, the superstar entertainer said, she wanted to sing a few songs “from the movies that I did” — not “the movies that I’ve done,” as a living (and still-ambitious) artist would surely have put it. The curious phrasing, with its eerie suggestion of a look back from beyond the grave, suddenly reminded you that who you were watching — what you were watching — was a hologram painstakingly designed years after Houston’s shocking death at age 48.
Via Prufrock. As technology improves, we can expect to see more such performances alongside digitally de-aged or manipulated versions of still-living entertainers.
The transporters in Star Trek seem like a really cool technology (and convenient plot device) — until you start thinking about the technology’s ramifications, that is.
There’s a whole philosophical debate about whether this really matters. If the person constructed on the other end is identical to you, down to the atomic level, is there any measurable difference from it being actually you? Those are questions we can’t begin to answer. What seems clear — whatever the technical manual says — is you die when you enter a transporter, however briefly.
I love chocolate, you love chocolate. (I mean, I really love chocolate.) But how much do we know about how chocolate is made or how to select delicious (yet ethically produced) chocolate?
Americans spend $21 billion on chocolate every year, but just because we eat a lot of it doesn’t mean we know what we’re eating. And misunderstandings at the store can make it especially hard for chocolate lovers to figure out which of the myriad, jauntily wrapped bars crowding the shelves are the best to buy, in terms of both taste and ethics.
Related: Some tips for tasting and reviewing chocolate.
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