I suppose I should start by mentioning that I am not really a night owl. If I need to get up early to leave for, say, ComicCon I can do that…I just go to bed a bit earlier than normal.
So when I set my alarm for 9pm so I could catch a short nap before heading to Planet Hollywood for the midnight (read it again… I didn’t mistype) start time for Cee Lo Green’s Loberace show, know that I did it for you, dear reader.

At the onset it is clear that Loberace has a few issues…the first is the start time: 11 pm Wednesday through Friday and midnight on Saturday. People in Vegas are doing two things at that time: 1) getting out of a show and heading to their rooms to change for the club or, more intelligently (in my humble opinion) 2) going to bed.

The show also tends to start 30 to 45 minutes late. This, I believe, stems from two issues: Cee Lo isn’t used to actually starting a show on time, like most musicians he starts his concert when he (or the stage) is ready and that is counter to the marked precision that Vegas shows tend to have (not all of them, but most of them). The late start is also in part to the change over that has to occur between the end of Peepshow and the beginning of Loberace. There is a lot of technical change that happens(curtains, lights, table lights etc…) and it takes awhile to get one show down and the other up and ready.

And my final issue is the blatant product endorsement of TyKu sake. I get that the show has an alcohol sponsor but having an announcement to make sure we get a TyKu cocktail before we “get your ass in your seat” for the (already late) show, having  its logo projected on each side of the stage, having table lamps made of the bottles, and having a toast (that sounded a lot more like an infomercial)  choreographed into the show is a bit much, even for Vegas (heck the logo is even on the stock photo above).

All that said, I still had a great time at the show. Cee Lo has outstanding energy and is obviously determined to help his audience have a great time. He walks around the crowd, chit-chats and in true Liberace style, tells corny, yet entertaining, jokes. He goes all out in his shiny one-piece track suits (because he “likes shiny shit”) and in general seems to have a great time. He sings most of his hits, does a few great covers and brings out Goodie Mob for a brief sing-along. His dancers are quite good and the show has great pacing, ending with the required audience participation heavy “F*ck You.”

I don’t know that Loberace would be the first show I would recommend for someone that is on their first trip to Vegas, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to deter people from seeing it if they asked. It was a good, albeit late, evening despite the minor hiccups that I hope will be smoothed out. If you’ve seen other shows and want something a bit different than the norm then Loberace could be the show for you.

Loberace runs Wed-Friday at 11 p.m. and Saturday at 12 a.m. at the Showroom at Planet Hollywood.

When I was in high school I didn’t understand or see Scott (we all called him by his given name, Rodney) for what he was: an amazing educator and outstanding mentor. Like all high school aged boys I was arrogant and self-absorbed. By my sophomore year I was in the jazz band and the highest concert band at the school and thought I was pretty impressive. I sat back and didn’t practice as much as I should have. I expected good things to happen in band because, damn it, I was good (I know now that there were plenty of others much better than I in our system). So when I auditioned to keep my spot at the end of my sophomore year I was not prepared and Scott did what was best for me (although I didn’t know it) – he put me back in beginning band and dropped me from the jazz band.

I was pissed… so pissed that I vowed to “show him” and busted my ass to make my junior year in band awesome just to spite him…I practiced and cajoled others into practicing with me because I was going to get my spot back no matter what Rodney said, a fact I made well known and Scott handled with grace and a sly smile. At the end of that year he shook my hand and said he was impressed with my hard work.

As an adult, and an educator, I know now that that was Scott’s goal all along. He knew that knocking me down a peg was going to be good for me; and it was. That is not to say I wasn’t still arrogant and self-absorbed… but later in my life that year would remind me of my responsibilities to myself and others. It is a time I reflect on often… especially  when I am feeling less than motivated to work hard on a task. That hand shake spoke volumes.

As I prepared to leave high school and move on to college, it was Scott, with a nudge from my soon-to-be college instructor, that made me rethink leaving music and not doing marching band in college. I cannot express how different my life would be now if Scott hadn’t insisted I “give marching band a try for a year” when I told him I was thinking about not doing any performance group at all. A large chunk of this blog’s readership, and some of my closest friends, came out of my years in the marching band.

My professional decision to take over an Arts program was also partly made with Scott’s help. When students approached me and asked me to consider revamping the program I went home and chatted with The-Spouse-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named as well as a few close friends. I was nervous to undertake such a large project in an Art I wasn’t familiar with. I thought about the work and then, while scanning through Facebook, I saw a post by Scott congratulating his current students on a well performed concert and saw the sincere happiness in his words and understood that, for him, and for me, the reward far outweighed the work.

At the end of my first year teaching a Performing Art I e-mailed Scott and thanked him for the work he did because I finally, and fully, understood. While all teachers put in extra hours, Arts teachers do so at a volume that is hard to grasp unless you’re an Arts teacher (or have children  in the Arts). Scott responded with a gracious thank you and words of encouragement and pride in what I, and all his former students, are doing with our lives. Words that, as I read them then and read them now, make me swell with pride.

Scott – Rodney – will be sorely missed. He is one of the men who inspired the way I teach. We used to joke and say “What Would Rodney Do” but that phrase, as funny as it is, has helped me make decisions for my students and our program. I can only hope and work to become as skilled as Scott at the art and craft of being an educator.

My only hope is that Scott understood what he meant to me – to all of us – and that as adults we understand what we meant to him.

I’ve avoided The Fault in Our Stars for some time now due to its content matter. Don’t get me wrong, I adore John Green (more on that later), but I cannot handle cancer as a topic for any form of art.

Cancer runs in my family like blonde hair or freckles run in other families; it lingers around in all of our bodies just waiting… I’ve lost multiple family members to it and have watched (and am watching) others fight the disease (disease seems like such a benign word all sterile and clean… so perhaps I’ll, just this once, call cancer what it is: a fucking awful process of one’s own cells killing one). So I have an intimate relationship with cancer and I hate the sickly sweet yet poignant way that contemporary artists, and in this case authors, deal with it (I’m looking at you Nicholas Sparks).

Let’s be truthful about it, cancer sucks. It sucks for those that have it and those that love them. It becomes all-consuming for everyone involved and more often than not, leaves the patient a physical shell of themselves and their loved one an emotional shell of themselves. So pardon me if I have an issue with cancer being the antagonist in some romance novel written to show that true love defeats all things… even cancer… even death.

With this in mind, I had deep reservations about Green’s star-crossed cancer kid romance novel.

I should have known better.

One of the reasons I consistently recommend Green to my students is that I feel he understands teenage life. He knows that the teen years are god-awful and that no sane, well adjusted adult would ever voluntarily go back to being a teenager. He knows that adolescence is hard in a way that most of us no longer understand. He also does a great job at showing teens that these years can be filled with beauty if you just stop and look around.

And in Fault he handles cancer the same way.

Green doesn’t sugar-coat cancer. His narrator, Hazel Grace has a terminal case and doesn’t try to hide the fact that 1) it sucks and 2) she is going to die. Quite often she refers to things as a side effect of dying (“…they always list depression as a side effect of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. It is a side effect of dying”) and her voice rings true.

What Green does best though, is avoid the convention of “healthy boy falls in love with dying girl.” Augustus, Hazel’s existentialist boyfriend (he keeps a cigarette in his mouth unlit. He places the thing that could kill him in his mouth but doesn’t let it kill him), is also a cancer patient. He is in remission at the beginning of the book but it becomes fairly obvious early on (the one fault in the book) that Augustus will relapse.

Through Hazel and Augustus we see the pain of cancer but we also see the joy of young love and it is beautiful and it is heartbreaking. They make light of their disease talking about “cancer perks” and good nurses versus bad nurses. They console each other when the disease gets worse and share joys when life is good. They live life while they can.

And when life isn’t there anymore, Green continues to write true. The funeral scene is spot on and the feelings portrayed are exactly what it is like to be left behind healthy or not.

In the end, The Fault in Our Stars is a well written, gorgeous piece of life on paper. Green is a master storyteller and understands how to be gentle with his readers when needed.

You should read this… but have a box of tissues ready.

Almost one month ago I cleaned out my Facebook account… and when I say cleaned out I mean I unfriended everyone that wasn’t in my direct family and 6 friends that are as close as family. I have 27 “friends” and it is amazing.

This all came about after Sandy Brook. I was going through my feed and reading the comments friends, true, honest-to-goodness friends, were making about both sides of the issue and I realized that not one of them would speak like that to me (or most other people) if we were having a face-to-face conversation.

I’ve always been a bit disillusioned with Facebook and knew it was a giant time-sucking beast. This time I decided to truly do something about it. I went home and deleted everyone but the aforementioned 27 people. Now my Facebook feed is mostly news pages to which I am subscribed and a few random comments by family… it is basically a glorified RSS feeder.

For the first few days I found myself habitually checking my feed quite frequently. It was alarming how often my thumb pushed that little blue and white icon on my phone. Facebook had become a part of a routine: check e-mail accounts then check Facebook repeat every half an hour or so. I’ve been weaned off of that habit now. I only check Facebook once a day or so, just to scan through the news and it only takes about 15 minutes at most.

The best part of all this is that I am more connected with my actual friends. Now, if I want to chat with the neighbor about something, I walk over and knock on the door instead of writing on her wall. When I meet with my D&D group each week, I no longer check my Facebook when it isn’t my turn and instead am much more engaged in the whole story and all the action. It is quite refreshing.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I totally quit Facebook, because I have a page I run for my classroom and a page I run for this blog. I also participate in a few community groups about education and blogging, so I still have a presence on the site, it is just a lot more restricted and it takes a lot less of my time.

So, dear reader, what should you take from this? If anything, I’d like you to think about the technology we all love and process what it is doing to our society. Sometimes, as Tyler Durden says, “the things you own end up owning you.”

I’ve had a few discussions over these past three weeks about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and all of them start with someone saying something to the effect of “why is that little book three movies?!”

Now, to start off, I am in no way dismissing the fact that making The Hobbit into three movies is a blatant money grab. But here is the thing… I will happily give them my money for all 3 films.

And here is why: the filler story comes (mostly) right out of the appendices and I LOVE the appendices almost as much as I love the books. My neighbor always snarks at me that I’m just a geek (duh) and that films should be made for the mainstream public. I agree, and those films were made, they’re called The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (the theatrical cut). Peter Jackson and the rest have the mainstream’s money so now they’re going straight to the heart of Tolkien geekdom an trying to get as much of Middle Earth into these three films as possible and you know what? Hell yes… that is what.

I saw the Hobbit on opening weekend (as did most of you, I’m sure) and I thought it was quite good. It felt like a trip back to a familiar destination and that is the best and worst thing I can say about it. It was a Peter Jackson directed Middle Earth film. I would have liked to see Guillermo Del Toro’s take on Hobbits, Dwarves and Orcs, but that just didn’t happen and well, I’m OK with that.

I’m looking forward to seeing Smaug, The Necromancer and more Radagast and I hope you are too.

-C

p.s. the inevitable question will come up about 48 FPS. I didn’t see it at this frame rate simply because I didn’t want to 1) drive that far down town and 2) wait. So I can’t really give a solid yea or nea on that topic.

http://ac2lv.com/2012/12/26/exotics-racing/

I’ll be back on Saturday.

-C

As part of my second annual comic-con adventure I decided to finally pick up Joe Hill’s Locke and Key 1-4. IDW, the company that publishes Locke and Key, is one of my favorite publishing companies and I have heard outstanding things about Locke and Key, all of them true.

In purchasing Locke and Key, I discovered something about my comic book reading: I’ve grown out of the traditional super hero books. I still love Superman, Spider-man and Batman but at their core, they are still for younger readers. I’ve moved to reading darker fantasy books like Animal Man and Swamp Thing (which if you are not reading, you should… start with the new #1) as well as books like Locke and Key.

The Locke children suffer a horrible loss when their family is attacked and their father murdered. After the funeral, the children, Bode, Kinsey and Ty, along with their mother move to their father’s childhood home – Key House. Hidden around Key House are… surprise, surprise… keys that, when they are used to open doors, grant the user powers. For example, my favorite key is the head key which allows the kids to open their heads and cram in knowledge or take out things like fear.

The keys, of course, are trouble and the kids suffer due to the presence of the keys. To tell you more is to ruin the story.

Locke and Key is, at its core, a story about family. Joe Hill examines what a family can endure and how they can continue to come back from amazing amounts of tragedy. Each child has baggage that relates to the death of their father and their mother develops an unhealthy attachement to wine. Add to this the continual issues that related to the keys, particularly the mysterious Omega Key and you have an outstanding plot line with complex characters that you want to love and hate.

Hill’s writing is terse and beautiful… he also knows when to shut up and let Gabriel Rodriguez’s art tell the story, as in Locke and Key #3: Crown of Shadows. The first twelve pages of chapter five: Light of Day have zero dialogue but are amazing storytelling.

Locke and Key is dark and disturbing, beautiful and touching. It is everything a good book, comic or prose, should be.

I would suggest purchasing the trade paperbacks from your local comic store because, dear reader, you should read this.

Oh dear reader… do you remember when I said I was going to try and do something different this year at Comic-Con? No? Go here, and then come back.

Now that we’re all on the same page…

I was stupid. While I did manage to get into Ballroom 20 on Thursday to see Elementary I failed to get in to see Firefly and failed to get into Hall H to see The Hobbit and Kevin Smith. And here is why: I wasn’t willing to camp out the night before. I paid for a hotel and for the nice warm continental breakfast they offered and I wanted to sleep in a bed each night. I’m not complaining, I’m simply pointing out that, although a huge fan of all the shows I wanted to see, I guess I wasn’t a huge enough fan.

This leads me to two observations:

First, There are a lot of pseudo-fans at Comic-Con. The convention itself has become an attraction and people are there simply because their spouse-partner-kid-friend-etc brought them or because they want to see a single panel across an entire day’s worth of amazing panels. They are not there for the entire event, and in many ways not actually what I would call a geek. For example, On Sunday I attempted to get the one item my wife mentioned, the Cirque du Soleil Ká comic book that Marvel was giving out. As I reached for the last one on the stand, having waded through the throng of people just grabbing free stuff, I was elbowed aside by an older lady, perhaps in her 60s. She grabbed the comic and shoved it in her bag without even looking at what it was. When I asked her if she knew what it was she venomously replied “free” and stomped off.

This is an issue. I heard a lot of comments in the big hall lines similar to “I don’t care about panel A, but I want to see panel G five hours from now so I am going to hang out.” Or similarly “I don’t even know what (insert show/comic book/ celebrity name) is but my partner wants to go see it and I want to be with him/her. These people tend to take seats that others who really want to be there could use.

Second, and not exclusive of the first issue, is that Comic-Con is too big for the San Diego Convention Center. I know that San Diego is planning and expansion, and that is great, but, to borrow a phrase, if you build it, they will come. Even if they expand and fill the limited space available to them, it will simply not be enough room. Comic-Con needs to look at moving to (granted this is biased) Las Vegas.

Ballroom 20 of the San Diego Convention Center holds roughly 4,000 people, almost 2,000 camped over night Thursday to see Firefly on Friday. By the time all was said and done, roughly 8,000 people lined up to see the panel. I actually felt quite badly for the kids behind me all dressed up for the Legend of Korra panel that was planned right before the Firefly panel. There was no way any of us were getting in and they missed a panel they wanted to see because SDCC doesn’t clear rooms between panels (a smart and time saving policy) and the Firefly fans camped out in ballroom 20.

The Sands Convention and Expo center in Vegas has two rooms that holds over 8,000 people and another that holds slightly over 7,000. This doesn’t include the smaller rooms in the center. It could handle the number of attendees far better and give the con at least 3 large rooms to host bigger panels and that is just one convention center… we have two, not counting the centers in the hotels!

All that being said, Comic-Con and San Diego are inextricably linked. There is something special about the combination that even my beloved Sin City cannot replicate. San Diego is also far more “kid-friendly;” you are far less likely to have someone hand you a pornographic playing card on the streets of San Diego. I’m honestly not sure how Comic-Con can continue to grow without moving, but if it moves I am afraid it will be something drastically different. It is a wonderfully horrible situation to be in; on the one hand the Con is growing and becoming a geek mecca, on the other hand its growing pains are taking away from the experience for some.

In the end, I’m still glad I attended the convention. I found some great new-for-me comics to read (more on that later) and saw a few panels that were outstanding. Overall it was, as always, an outstanding week and I look forward to next year.

For all intents and purposes, if you liked the classic late 80s-early 90s show with Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman(currently on Netflix streaming if you haven’t seen it), you should like this new version. It was developed and is produced by a few of the same people.
The difference, though, is in the acting and writing. Perlman and Hamilton had true chemistry and were both already outstanding acting talents in their own right. The new duo consists of Kristin Kreuk of Smallville fame (Lana Lane) and Jay Ryan of… no fame at all. There is very little chemistry between the two and frankly very little acting chops.

The original writing team consisted of talents like George R. R. Martin (if you don’t know him you’re on the wrong blog), Howard Gordon (Awake, 24, Homeland) and Alex Gansa (24, Homeland, X-Files). The new writing team, at this moment, consists of Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin who can lay claim to writing episodes of Brothers and Sisters and Felicity.
And that is the big difference, the old Beauty and the Beast was a fantasy/action show by sci-fi/fantasy writers; the new version is just another of the CWs fantasy/romance teen dramas aimed at the 30something female bracket. It lacks worthwhile writing and honest acting.
Skip it.

Elementary (CBS, Fall 2012)

Now before all you Sherlock fans get your knickers in a bunch (see what I did there?), I get what you’re thinking. Why do we need another modern day Sherlock Holmes show, when the BBC version is so damn good!? Why the hell is Lucy Liu playing Watson? What is wrong with America that it has to steal all the good British shows (this is an arguable point)?

Let me point out, what I believe, is your error in thinking. These two shows are pulling from an amazingly rich and deep source material. No one threw a fit when the BBC Sherlock showed up after the Robert Downey Jr. film. Why? Because they are two very different versions of Holmes, yet with enough similarities to let us believe in both. Such is the case with the new show Elementary.

I went into this preview wanting to hate this show for all the same reasons I list above, but left extremely excited. Miller’s version of Holmes is a brilliant mix of all the good parts of Downey Jr. and Cumberbatch. He is impulsive and brash like the Downey Jr. version and brilliantly smart and idiosyncratic like Cumberbatch’s Holmes.

As for Lucy Liu… well she is an outstanding foil to Lee. Her Watson has some backbone and is far more complex than some versions of Watson (I’m looking at you, Jude Law). I know that some people out there are all worked up because they think CBS is trying to eliminate the slight homo-eroticism that Watson and Holmes tend to have in the books, I honestly don’t think that is the case. Simply put, they were trying to put a different twist on a set of characters that we all are familiar with, and you know what? It works. Watch it.

Cult (The CW, Fall 2012)

Cult starts off with an interesting premise: what if a show about a cult actually spawned a cult that did cultish type activities? Basically it is asking what happens when the line between entertainment and real life blurs.

It, as a I said, is an interesting premise that is just not well written. Take for instance, a scene that made myself and a few of my companions laugh out loud (this is a drama… one really shouldn’t lol). In this scene our intrepid reporter is searching through his missing brother’s goods. Now, the house has previously been searched by him and the police, but this time he finds his brother’s notebook all about the show (also named Cult…also on the CW) and it was sitting right on the desk under some papers! How did he miss it before?! As he leafs through the notebook he notices a page with a bunch of pictures of him and his brother, upon closer examination he sees that the pages are glued together. When he pulls them apart a CD falls out! A CD that he didn’t notice the first three times he leafed past those pages. Really?… I mean… Really?

The writing is horrible… skip it.

The Following (Fox, Mid-season 2013)

This was the surprise show of the convention for me. I sat through it because I wanted to see Revolution. I suppose I should not have been surprised given that the lead roles are played by Kevin Bacon (who is making up for some bad movie roles) and James Purefoy (probably best known as Marc Antony in Rome). The story idea isn’t too new; retired FBI agent (Bacon) is haunted by his last case which causes severe alcoholism. Mass murder (Purefoy) from said case escapes to finish the murder he couldn’t complete because he was captured.

The twist, however, is f*cking brilliant!

I give Kevin Williamson, who also wrote Scream, crazy credit for outstanding writing and Fox (yea I said it) credit for letting the show be as gruesome as it needs to be (granted you don’t see the killer take a life, but you sure see the aftermath).
This show is totally worth watching.

Revolution (NBC, Fall 2012)

This show has been EVERYWHERE in the past few months. It has a monstrous amount of hype; and why not? Look at the names attached to it: J.J. Abrams (no need to list his credentials), Bryan Burk (see J.J.’s credentials), Eric Kripke (Supernatural) and John “Iron Man” Favreau.

The premise is simple: what if everything that needs power – cars, planes, computers, etc.. – just stopped working? It is a very different post-apocalyptic scenario than what we are used to. However, this is J.J., Bryan an Eric so the premise is just a way to examine what it means to be human and what it means to be family (a common theme in Eric’s writing). I would also bet dollars to doughnuts that this group knows exactly how long the show will run and how it will end. If you like any of J.J. or Eric’s previous works you will like Revolution. This really is a show I would love to see succeed so please, watch it. It is worth it.