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I'm on a bit of a David Bowie kick today, mostly because today's podcast episode of
WTF with Marc Maron was an interview with Brett Morgen, director of the upcoming "immersive documentary" about David Bowie. Tracy and I had long been planning to go see it together, until we discovered last week that it opens this coming Friday, in the middle of her weekling trip to Las Vegas. So, I guess I'll have to go see it by myself on Saturday.
Anyway. Once again, finally subscribing to a music streaming service (in my case Apple Music) proves to have been worthwhile: the only album I ever owned by David bowie was his 1990 compilation album
Changesbowie, which was a CD Mom used to have and she let me have it. I didn't even buy it myself, nor have I ever owned one of his original, full length studio albums. I got pretty familiar with the 18 tracks on
Changesbowie, however, a lot of which I really like.
On Apple Music, I decided to listen to the last album he ever recorded,
Blackstar (2016), which I recall being loved almost universally by critics. I did kind of enjoy it. Now as I write this, though, I wanted to find a compilation that covers more of his career than only pre-1990, so I'm listening to a collection called
Legacy, which his also from 2016. There's a 20-track standard edition that is the one I am listening to; there's another "Deluxe Edition" that is twice as long as well.
I kind of missed the boat on Bowie, probably because the height of his fame was in the early to mid-eighties, just before I really started getting into pop music. And as it turns out, that mid-eighties period was the only time in his vast career when his music truly went mainstream.
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So how about my weekend, then? I was supposed to meet Laney for a Happy Hour at Marination Ma Kai in West Seattle on Friday, but she texted me that afternoon to ask if we could reschedule because her stomach wasn't feeling quite right. I'm glad I didn't pack a dinner or a drink like I had previously for Happy Hours in the park near there. As it was, it was easy for me to do, and it's now rescheduled for Wednesday. This is leaving me with a very busy week ahead of me: I'm taking myself to a movie tonight (the first movie I'll be seeing in a theater since Shobhit and I went to see the 3D
Jaws last Tuesday, and the first movie I'll be reviewing since
Three Thousand Years of Longing on August 28 . . . damn). Tomorrow evening is free, but then there's Happy Hour with Laney on Wednesday; and "party watch" movie night with Kwanteria on Thursday. No plans so far for Friday, but I hope to see the aforementioned
Moonage Daydream Bowie documentary on Saturday. And I have my appointment for the omicron covid booster vaccine shot late morning on Sunday.
The weekend looks (right now anyway) to be pretty mellow, which will be fine before the following weekend, when I ride over to Wallace, Idaho with Dad and Sherri for Christopher's 50th birthday on the 24th, immediately followed by the Family Vacation in Leavenworth on the 26th, which Shobhit will be meeting us at.
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On Saturday, soon after Shobhit got home from work, he and Alexia and I knocked out two more of the Star Wars movies in our ongoing watch-marathon, this time a double feature:
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and
Star Wars Episode I: A New Hope (1977). Although we actually watched the 1977 theatrical release version that none of us have watched in decades—in fact, Shobhit likely had never seen that version at all.
The plan all along had been to watch the original theatrical versions of the original trilogy on the DVD boxed set I have from somewhere around 2008. This was the last time those versions were made available, and anything newer George Lucas has insisted be the remastered 1997 re-releases with enhanced CGI in them. (I literally discovered while writing this that the boxed set I now have is surprisingly valuable: it's going for
nearly two hundred bucks on Amazon.)
I honestly can't remember if I ever watched the original theatrical versions when I first got that DVD boxed set. I don't think I did, which means I haven't watched the original versions since I once had them on VHS tape, and probably not since before the 1997 release. So, I hadn't seen this version of
Star Wars (which was all that first one was called for many years after its first release) in at least two and a half decades. So, this was a very fascinating experience, as the movie was
far more retrofitted with late-nineties CGI than I realized. I'm talking, right down to the lasers coming out of blaster guns, which in the 1977 original are thicker, and look like they may have been painted directly onto the individual frames on the film.
Suffice it to say, the film looks a
lot different than most viewers today are used to. And even though Lucas always insisted he did this because it was what he wanted audiences to see to begin with, I was interested in seeing the actual film 1977 audiences fell in love with at the start. It looks pretty low budget and rudimentary, and yet is stunningly impressive for both the time of its release and the limited resources Lucas had at his disposal. Watching it in context, the film is actually more impressive this way than with nearly every single effects shot "modernized" in the 1997 re-release version.
It was also really cool to watch it as a double feature with
Rogue One, because
Rogue One ends with just a few minutes overlapping with the very beginning of
A New Hope. I even learned in the
"trivia" section of Rogue One that
Gareth Edwards and his creative team discovered some old film canisters while rummaging around the Lucasfilm warehouses. When he asked what they were, an employee said they were old Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) footage. The discovery led to the inclusion of unused Episode IV material featuring Red Leader and Gold Leader in this movie.
and, more specifically:
The footage of some of the X-Wing pilots (especially Red and Gold Leader) including a call-sign exchange are originally deleted footage from the Death Star attack shot for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) but digitally cut into the footage shot for this film.
I thought that was very cool, and made for some great visual continuity between the two films watching them back to back.
I had texted Alexia with the "double feature" idea late last week, and was surprised to find her totally into it. Saturday was forecast to have a high of 90° though, and she wanted to watch both movies over at her place. She doesn't have a DVD player, which at first I thought posed a problem, until she suggested I just bring my Blu-Ray player over there. Duh. Easy! I did have to go back to my condo to get an extension cord, but otherwise we got it taken care of, with just one slight glitch: the 1977 version of
Star Wars would not play with the letterboxed picture filling the screen side to side without stretching the picture. It was very distracting, and I looked up some help documents online, which finally allowed us to get the picture to dimensions that did not stretch it. It forced black boxes not only above and below but on either side of the picture too though, giving us a much smaller picture than Alexia's huge TV screen should be allowing. She even called it "tiny" although the picture itself was probably still larger than Shobhit's and my old 27" TV, so it was still fine, really.
I plan to test it on our TV at home though, and when we watch the next one, hopefully we can see it at our place without having the same issue. Next up is the best in the entire series,
The Empire Strikes Back, so I'll be really fascinated to see how that looks in its original 1980 form, but with a lot more resources at their disposal due to the massive success of the first film. It just occurred to me that I may see if Alexia wants to watch that one this Friday—oh wait, never mind: she's out of town with her own family vacation Wednesday through Sunday, during which I'll be taking care of Cassie. We may not be able to watch the next movie until the very end of the month or even September.
Oh, shit. All this time I had been thinking Shobhit would watch all of these movies with us, but he leaves for India October 9 and then returns with his mom on the 28th. How we'll schedule around that, or maybe not at all, is a bridge we'll cross when we come to it, I guess.
Anyway. We had to bring quite the cache of items over with us: Shobhit and I had burritos we made for ourselves (we offered one to Alexia but she declined); I made chai for all three of us; I also made a big bowl of popcorn. And then of course there were the Blu-Ray (and DVD) player and the DVD boxed set. We also returned her tool box which we borrowed again to realign the shower cartridge in the primary bedroom's shower—it had begun to leak again. I think we've fixed it again. Mostly.
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Then there's yesterday: Shobhit and I drove down to Renton just to hang out with Danielle, and catch up, at her house for a few hours in the late morning and early afternoon, before she started her work shift at 2:00. She really enjoyed this and remarked on how nice it was, just to have friends over to sit and talk over coffee (I brought my own chai) before she went to work. We got there at about 10:15 in the morning and left at maybe 1:15, making our visit about three hours.
I had not hung out with her in person since my Birth Week, on May 2. Too long. And I'm pretty sure Shobhit hadn't hung out with her since we went to her place for the Fourth of July in 2021!
Way too long.
I have a similar deal going on with Gabriel, by the way. I haven't seen him since my Birth Week in May either. I managed to get Danielle in under the wire so she gets at least one point on the Summer Social Review, but it's basically a guarantee at this point that Gabriel won't be on it at all, which is rare. He thinks the Social Review is so stupid that I'm sure he'll be thrilled. Maybe we can find a way to hang out sometime while Shobhit is in India next month, though.
Danielle has a new back deck, which she insists was already up when I was there in May but I couldn’t remember it. The new concrete laid under that deck, with new steps and an area for future fire pit and hot tub, plus the bottom step on the front path in front of the house, was all laid within the last week, apparently. We spent a lot of time sitting and chatting and drinking our coffee (or in my case chai) in chairs on the deck beyond the sliding glass door behind the upper level of her house. It actually was quite pleasant.
Once we left, since we were in the area, Shobhit and I went shopping at the Asian/South Asian grocery store, DK Market. He got a bucket for his mom to use while she's here. I guess she doesn't really use a convention shower nor does she take conventional baths (and when I say "conventional" I just mean in the typical American understanding of them, for lack of a better word), and instead will sit in the tub (or shower—Shobhit is concerned about her ability to step into the tub in our guest bathroom and may have her use the shower in our primary bedroom's bathroom) with a bucket of water to use for, I guess, basically a sponge bath?
I do have to remember that she's quite a bit older now than when she last visited, fourteen years ago. She was 62 then. Now she's 76.
I just looked at my calendars though, and only just discovered: her birthday is October 23. Okay, I've known that before, but what I'm realizing is that, by the time she visits, she'll have turned 77. So, because it'll actually have been fourteen
and a half years since her last visit, she was 62 when she was here last but will be 77 when she's here next. That's assuming I have her birth year correct, anyway. I know historically she's been a little cagey about that.
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[posted 12:24 pm]
