Live from Austin!

Snakes On A Plane. You can just imagine the pitch meeting.

Turner: I have got this killer idea for an action horror movie.

Ellis: Sure, hit me.

Turner: OK, here’s the setup…there are a bunch of people on a plane. And the plane is carrying a load of, like, poisonous snakes. And the snakes are accidentally let out.

Ellis: Are you drunk?

Turner: No, listen, there’s more. Samuel L. Jackson is on the plane. He, like, kicks the snakes’ asses.

Ellis: I’m not sure snakes have asses.

Turner: Tails, then. But you get the idea…Samuel L. Jackson. In a plane. And the plane is full of snakes.

Ellis: So what’s it called?

Turner: Snakes On A Plane.

Ellis: I knew it, you’re baked.

Turner: No, it’s marketing genius. Nobody reads what it says on posters, we don’t need reviews, we don’t even need trailers—it’s, like, all there in the title. Snakes…On A Plane, man!

Ellis: Wow. It’s almost Zen-like in its minimalism. So outline the plot for me.

Turner: You’re still not getting it. I just did! It’s snakes…on a plane. Obviously I’ll get a few of my friends to help pad it out to an hour and a half, but it’ll practically write itself.

Ellis: OK, sounds good, get me a draft. Anything else?

Turner: Sure, and you’re going to love this. One word: sequels.

Ellis: Oh, yeah, I’m liking that.

Turner: There’s no telling where this baby could go. Snakes On A Boat. Snakes On A Train. Snakes On A Bus. Snakes In A Restaurant. Snakes In A Goddamn Movie Theater, and we drop rubber snakes on the audience half way through! It’s fuckin’ genius, man!

Ellis: Oh, yeah. I think I just creamed my pants. I’m taking this to New Line, Emmerich will green light this faster than Terry Gilliam can blow a budget. Let’s do lunch next week.

Let’s predict a few key bits of plot:

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• Snake emerges from aircraft lavatory.
• Oxygen masks drop down, only some of them are snakes.
• Constrictor gets into lifejacket, is worn around neck.

After a day of working from home, I had to get out of the computer room. I went to Harvard Square in search of a 2x mono 3.5mm jack to 1x stereo 3.5mm plug converter. I found one at Radio Shack, but it’s a blocky thing that won’t plug directly into the camcorder, so I need to either find a really short 3.5mm stereo headphone extension cable, or wire up my own converter.

Then I saw that HMV had reached the “40% off everything” stage of their “going out of business” sale. That took their overpriced $18.99 CDs to under my $12 limit, so I cleared out what was left of the Plaid, Komputer and Boards of Canada sections. The place was packed full of people, and the shelves are pretty empty of anything desirable at this point. (Off the top of my head: there’s no Pink Floyd, three Zappa CDs, no Autechre, most of the good Squarepusher has gone, no mu-Ziq, and now no Plaid or Boards of Canada either. Every Stanley Kubrick DVD is gone, ditto Terry Gilliam. Most of the Criterion Collection discs are gone.)

You know, every time a store has an actual sale with reasonable prices, I end up spending a ton of money. The rest of the time I buy nothing. I keep hoping that one day someone at the big media corporations will take a look at the sales figures and work out what’s going on. “Gee, if we cut the price of the CDs to $10-12, we sell five times as many, and if we cut the price to $8 we sell ten times as many.”

This HMV closedown is a pretty clear indication that it’s not just me, either. The Classical section was almost empty; 80% or more of the stock was gone. All they had to do was cut it to a reasonable price and it flew off the shelves. Cut the profit margin in half and sell ten times as many, and you make five times as much money. What is it with the record industry that they can’t see this? It makes me want to bang my head against a wall in frustration. Or even better, bang Hilary Rosen’s head against a wall…

I’ve bought a handful of tracks from the Apple Music Store. I’ve concluded that it does make sense, for a very limited purpose: buying one-off tracks where I would never buy anything else from the artist in question. For instance, I bought “Journey of the Sorcerer” by Eagles, because a quick audition told me there was nothing else I’d ever want to listen to on that album. (Or any of their others, as far as I could tell.)

Generally, though, I listen to entire albums, and the iTunes store just doesn’t make sense for albums. The quality’s too low, the restrictions are too annoying, and the price is too high. But spending 99 cents to get “Journey of the Sorcerer” instead of $12, that makes sense. Now, if only they’ll add the one interesting Andrew Lloyd Webber track (it’s about 3 minutes long), the one good track on Peter Baumann’s “Romance ’76”, and so on…

HMV coda

They still have shitloads of Yanni, however. Nothing’ll make that stuff shift.

Since I missed the MLK day holiday while I was down in Florida, I took a random day off today. I met up with Mark, and he took me to a restaurant in Chinatown and ordered something in Chinese. What turned up was a plate of some kind of dark green beans, a plate of crispy tofu, and some rice. It was good, as was the tea. Then he showed me a pastry shop that sells cakes comparable to Mike’s Pastry, but for under a buck each.

After that, we went to the cinema and watched The Mothman Prophecies. Like the director’s previous movie, Arlington Road, it had a very striking visual style—I used to think that Terry Gilliam would be the ideal director for a movie of “Watchmen”, but now I think it would be Mark Pellington. The soundtrack was adeptly assembled and devoid of cliché too—tomandandy at work. Having said all that, it wasn’t as good a movie as Arlington Road—it never quite achieved the same degree of tension. I’d compare it to a moderately good X-Files episode with better cinematography.