Wednesday, August 22, 2007
About 30 years late to the party.
There are certain bands that will never by "mine." I will always think of them as the bands my older sister and her friends listened to: Kansas, AC/DC, Pat Benatar, Styx, Foreigner... and Kiss.
As I kid, I just found Kiss freaking bizarre. I was too young to get that they just a rock band (I would never call them "heavy metal," because they're not). You see interviews with them from back then, and it was all in good fun, tongue in cheek. But they just seemed dark and evil to me, with their platform boots, black outfits, makeup, spitting blood and fire. Just look:
Gene Simmons is apparently one of the friendliest guys on the planet (He has a reality show on A&E, for pete's sake. ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL!), but when I was five or six, he scared me. One friend's older brother had a poster of Gene on stage, with blood running down his face. Nightmare material to an innocent kid such as me.
Kiss went into super marketing mode in the late 1970s, and you could see Kiss dolls, lunchboxes, bedsheets... if you named a product, you could probably buy an officially licensed version of it with the band's faces on it.
I didn't want anything to do with that stuff, obviously. He scared me, yet I could buy a toy of him? How bizarre was that? (I know now you can buy toys of most horror movie characters, but back then it was a new concept).
Where am I going with all this? I'm not unloading childhood emotional baggage. I'm bring all this up to mention that I watched Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park the other night. On the box, Gene says they were pitched the idea as A Hard Day's Night (the Beatles movie) meets Star Wars. The final results were not quite like that. The band has powers. Gene can spit fire, Ace can teleport, Paul can shoot rays from his eyes, and Chris... well, he doesn't actually demonstrate any power. I guess they ran out of ideas or money by the time they got to the drummer. The movie is hilarious though. The band fights robotic cat men. I'll say that again: The band fights robotic cat men. Awesome. You can find the movie on YouTube, but it's worth renting on DVD to get the full experience. It's in amazing condition for a made-for-TV movie from so long ago.
As I kid, I just found Kiss freaking bizarre. I was too young to get that they just a rock band (I would never call them "heavy metal," because they're not). You see interviews with them from back then, and it was all in good fun, tongue in cheek. But they just seemed dark and evil to me, with their platform boots, black outfits, makeup, spitting blood and fire. Just look:
Gene Simmons is apparently one of the friendliest guys on the planet (He has a reality show on A&E, for pete's sake. ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL!), but when I was five or six, he scared me. One friend's older brother had a poster of Gene on stage, with blood running down his face. Nightmare material to an innocent kid such as me.Kiss went into super marketing mode in the late 1970s, and you could see Kiss dolls, lunchboxes, bedsheets... if you named a product, you could probably buy an officially licensed version of it with the band's faces on it.
I didn't want anything to do with that stuff, obviously. He scared me, yet I could buy a toy of him? How bizarre was that? (I know now you can buy toys of most horror movie characters, but back then it was a new concept).
Where am I going with all this? I'm not unloading childhood emotional baggage. I'm bring all this up to mention that I watched Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park the other night. On the box, Gene says they were pitched the idea as A Hard Day's Night (the Beatles movie) meets Star Wars. The final results were not quite like that. The band has powers. Gene can spit fire, Ace can teleport, Paul can shoot rays from his eyes, and Chris... well, he doesn't actually demonstrate any power. I guess they ran out of ideas or money by the time they got to the drummer. The movie is hilarious though. The band fights robotic cat men. I'll say that again: The band fights robotic cat men. Awesome. You can find the movie on YouTube, but it's worth renting on DVD to get the full experience. It's in amazing condition for a made-for-TV movie from so long ago.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Great weekend
The weekend began Friday after work with me running by my local Border's, using a 40% off coupon to pick up an autographed copy of The Way Home, the latest book by the amazing Washington, DC author George Pelecanos (I couldn't make his reading on June 3, but luckily he signs extra copies for the store). Then I had to rush home to mow the lawn in record time (under an hour), beating the thunderstorms by about 30 minutes. Friday night we watched whatever we had saved on the TiVo during the week.
Saturday we met a friend around 1pm at National Harbor for the Beer, Bourbon, and BBQ festival. With over 60 beers and 40 bourbons available to sample, we had decided to fortify first with lunch at Ketchup. It turned out to be a great choice.
They start by bringing you five kinds of ketchup: maple, honey, regular, raspberry, and chipotle. What do you do when you get five kinds of ketchup? You order fries:
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The fries were (l to r): Old Bay seasoned, sweet potato, and parmesan.
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We also got the mini chicken tacos. I realized the pic on the left gives no sense of scale. It looks like normal tacos. So I took another pic, with my finger beside them for reference. And no, my fingers aren't eight inches long.
Around 2 we walked over to the festival. No pics, as I was busy trying a lot of adult beverages. But there were three huge rectangular shaped tents, so you stayed in the shade and circled the tents, trying this and that with the glass you were provided at the gate. We definitely more than made up for the admission fee if you figure the cost of trying each beer in a bar. The outer rim of the festival was lined with the BBQ folks. There were also cigar dealers there, so there were more than a few hipster douchbags with popped collars and smelly cigars wandering around, but the prospect of trying a different new beer made them easier to stomach. With so many brewers attending, there were never more than three people ahead of you in line at even the most popular tables. Our friend who had come with us kept calling her husband (who had been unable to attend) and making him jealous by describing the different beers and bourbons. She proclaimed that next year we were getting a room at the nearby hotel and the four of us were attending the festival from open to close.
We had had our fill by around 4:30, so we headed home, grabbing a two hour nap. Saturday night Laura's cousin (who had lived with us for six weeks when she first moved down here from NYC to begin her government job) and her boyfriend (who was visiting from NYC) came over around 8 and we caught up, then went to see "The Hangover" (link to official trailer HERE, in case you've been in a coma and never caught it the millions of times it ran on TV). It was very funny. I'd watch it again on DVD. We came back to the house and hung out until 1:30am. Late night for Laura and me!
Sunday I decided that after a day full of burgers and beer, I was ready for something lighter. Laura sent me out to pick up lunch somewhere and I stopped at La Medeleine for salads and tomato soup. It turns out that the restaurant is next door to Border's (yes, the same one I stopped at on Friday afternoon). I still had the 40% off coupon with me, since the cashier had scanned the one she kept by the register and not the one I had brought, so I popped back inside and selected a CD: "Made in Dakar," the latest release by Orchestra Baobob, the band you never knew about in the '70s but their reformation a few years ago has enriched the world. These guys are AMAZING.
After lunch, it was cloudy and dark, threatening rain, so I settled into the guest room with the Star Trek animated series (with plots written by the original series writers and with the voices of all the original cast, this is called the unofficial fourth season), watching three episodes before giving in to the urge for a nap.
Sunday night rolled around, as it inevitably does. I made ground turkey tacos for dinner for us and finally had to go to bed around 10, with one dog and two cats deciding to come along and the wife and the other dog deciding to stay up a few more hours.
There. More details than you probably wanted to know and more links than you ever wanted to see. My weekend.
Saturday we met a friend around 1pm at National Harbor for the Beer, Bourbon, and BBQ festival. With over 60 beers and 40 bourbons available to sample, we had decided to fortify first with lunch at Ketchup. It turned out to be a great choice.
They start by bringing you five kinds of ketchup: maple, honey, regular, raspberry, and chipotle. What do you do when you get five kinds of ketchup? You order fries:.jpg)
The fries were (l to r): Old Bay seasoned, sweet potato, and parmesan..jpg)
.jpg)
We also got the mini chicken tacos. I realized the pic on the left gives no sense of scale. It looks like normal tacos. So I took another pic, with my finger beside them for reference. And no, my fingers aren't eight inches long.
Around 2 we walked over to the festival. No pics, as I was busy trying a lot of adult beverages. But there were three huge rectangular shaped tents, so you stayed in the shade and circled the tents, trying this and that with the glass you were provided at the gate. We definitely more than made up for the admission fee if you figure the cost of trying each beer in a bar. The outer rim of the festival was lined with the BBQ folks. There were also cigar dealers there, so there were more than a few hipster douchbags with popped collars and smelly cigars wandering around, but the prospect of trying a different new beer made them easier to stomach. With so many brewers attending, there were never more than three people ahead of you in line at even the most popular tables. Our friend who had come with us kept calling her husband (who had been unable to attend) and making him jealous by describing the different beers and bourbons. She proclaimed that next year we were getting a room at the nearby hotel and the four of us were attending the festival from open to close.
We had had our fill by around 4:30, so we headed home, grabbing a two hour nap. Saturday night Laura's cousin (who had lived with us for six weeks when she first moved down here from NYC to begin her government job) and her boyfriend (who was visiting from NYC) came over around 8 and we caught up, then went to see "The Hangover" (link to official trailer HERE, in case you've been in a coma and never caught it the millions of times it ran on TV). It was very funny. I'd watch it again on DVD. We came back to the house and hung out until 1:30am. Late night for Laura and me!
Sunday I decided that after a day full of burgers and beer, I was ready for something lighter. Laura sent me out to pick up lunch somewhere and I stopped at La Medeleine for salads and tomato soup. It turns out that the restaurant is next door to Border's (yes, the same one I stopped at on Friday afternoon). I still had the 40% off coupon with me, since the cashier had scanned the one she kept by the register and not the one I had brought, so I popped back inside and selected a CD: "Made in Dakar," the latest release by Orchestra Baobob, the band you never knew about in the '70s but their reformation a few years ago has enriched the world. These guys are AMAZING.
After lunch, it was cloudy and dark, threatening rain, so I settled into the guest room with the Star Trek animated series (with plots written by the original series writers and with the voices of all the original cast, this is called the unofficial fourth season), watching three episodes before giving in to the urge for a nap.Sunday night rolled around, as it inevitably does. I made ground turkey tacos for dinner for us and finally had to go to bed around 10, with one dog and two cats deciding to come along and the wife and the other dog deciding to stay up a few more hours.
There. More details than you probably wanted to know and more links than you ever wanted to see. My weekend.
--The End--
