Author: Mark Alexander

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A Hospital is a Weird Place

A hospital is a weird place. In one room a man is holding his son for the first time. In another room, a man is holding his father for the last time. In yet another room, some idiot is having something that should never have been shoved up there in the first place removed from his rectum.

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Released 41 Years Ago Today

Alec R. Constandinos: Romeo & Juliet (1978)

So many memories attached to this one, but the one that stands out the most was taking the record into Jerry’s Audio in Phoenix (one of many high end audio stores at the time) and having it played through a pair of Gale401‘s. At the time the Gales were my dream speakers, priced somewhere in the stratosphere and completely unobtainable on my $2.75/hour Broadway Southwest Sales Associate budget, but to my young ears (that could actually easily still hear to 20kHz!), they sounded even better than the JBL L100s. I knew all the salesmen at Jerry’s and one of them (a notorious hard rocker) came running into the listening room yelling, “What is this disco shi…” He stood there for a minute listening and finally said, “Damn, that sounds good.” Romeo & Juliet was supposedly one of the first records mixed down from a 48-track master and even today it does sound damn good.

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Unnecessary

One of the movies we didn’t get a chance to see when it came out last summer because of financial constraints was Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Based on the reviews I’d read, I took the fact that I missed seeing it when it was in the theaters as a blessing in disguise. When it appeared on BlueRay a few weeks ago I briefly considered purchasing a copy, but again lack of funds prevented me from doing so.

It appeared on Netflix a few nights ago.

I was not impressed. In my opinion it wasn’t so much a bad movie as simply an unnecessary one in the Star Wars pantheon. Yeah it provided backstory of how Han and Chewbacca met, how he won the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian, and provided the expected stunning special effects and action sequences, but I came away thinking, “They went to a hell of a lot of trouble  making this film simply to explain away a stupid technical error—Han’s bragging that he “made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs” (a parsec being a unit of distance, not time) in the original Star Wars film.

Maybe it’s just the curmudgeon in me, but I’m starting to believe there can actually be too much Star Wars; that the magic is being diluted.

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