substitute

"Connecting the intertwining strands are a group of beautiful, blonde young men and women who sleep all day and party all night, doing drugs -- and one another --with abandon, never realizing that they are dancing on the edge of a volcano."

One of the worst things about substance abuse is unsafe dancing. But who the hell put the dance floor next to the volcano in the first place? It's not even near the bar, and people keep knocking over the safety cones.

And go get someone else to connect the intertwining strands. These people are incompetent.

I just watched a documentary called HIDDEN FIRE: THE GREAT BUTTE EXPLOSION.

[insert beavis laugh]

It was horrible. Bullet points of the horrible:

• Standard post-Ken Burns style with sad violins, period pictures, and voiceovers reading letters and newspaper articles. "Dear Mama..." Did everything in the 19th century happen with a bassoon or a scrapy fiddle playing?
  
  
• Hack academics with slow careful mellow NPR English diction saying obvious things and things that made no sense. Firefighters were simultaneously described as indentured servants and as inhabitants of a bastion of male privilege. The local historian said that people forgot about the incident because people forget things.
  
  
• The town archivist, who was exactly Dana Carvey's Church Lady. She kept telling us that "that's how things go in Butte" when describing unique and bizarre atrocities such as mining companies being beastly, or rich guys going unpunished. After each disapproving "Forget it, Jake" statement she stopped and pursed her lips like a high school assistant principal announcing detention.
  
  
• Two ladies in the town had written a very 1895 poem and song about the explosion. The documentary people actually hired a couple of musicians to record an over-the-top version of this song with tremulous soprano singing (this was hideously painful) and then played almost the whole thing.
  
  
• A terrible constipated straining at the toilet of ivory tower liberalism. This included the constant inclusion of "diversity" and pictures of Chinese immigrants, and the specious assertion that some of them must have died because there was a railway station next door and therefore they would have been just arriving. Everyone actually involved in the incident was a white male, except for the horses.
  
  
• A bespectacled bearded academic who said, roughly ten times, that firefighters are brave and sometimes die, and that this is noticed more after an incident in which many of them do, and then not as much for a few years. I think he was Anne Elk.
  
  
• Reenaction of incidents in 1895 using "silent movie" film effects and piano background, as if it was somehow a 1925 silent melodrama. Folks I guess it's all "period."
  
  
• No actual analysis of the economic state of Butte, who the major players were, why exactly the miscreants behind the explosion weren't punished, or even what the fuck they were mining in Butte at the time. It was just assumed that there were Powers That Be, and that businessmen weren't punished even if they killed 57 people. More disapproving pursing of the lips and playing of sad bassoons. Come on, guys. Three minutes of exposition in a documentary is not hard.
  
  
• Who greenlighted the title THE GREAT BUTTE EXPLOSION? This is a Montana PBS production. It's going to be shown to school kids. Are you this dumb?
  
  
• Ken Burns has ruined documentary filmmaking. It's all The Old Negro Space Program now.

Okay I'm done and I can go back to bed now.

My copy of the new release of Vampyr arrived today!

Spooky times ahead! Yay!

This is Nick's fault.

I found a typo in your movie. The opening exposition text scroll spells "occurrence" with one R.

Yours,

substitute, compulsive copy editor

In my part of Orange County, affordable housing is rare. One of the disappearing features of the landscape is the trailer park. We used to have quite a few around here but one by one they're disappearing to be replaced with more familiar suburban things like parking lots and office buildings. The one down the street from me exists solely because the land is owned by a family that is resistant to change and has lots of money already, for example.

Until recently there was a trailer park on the campus of UC Irvine, where my father was charter faculty in 1965. The University, being college administrators, needed a new parking lot, so off it went. But not after some spirited student resistance from ornery and inventive graduate students!

A film has been made of the last days of Irvine Meadows West: http://trailerparkfilm.com/

I recommend seeing the trailer. It's a bit hippiebongoburningman but gives a good idea of the scene. One of my college friends from the 80s, Maggie Sullivan, was involved in this scene but I don't see her in the trailer. I mean the movie trailer, not the actual trailers in the movie about trailers.

Vergüenza Ajena, to the maxxxxXxXXXX:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=924zmIi55P8&search=racism

It was really hard to watch this all the way through. Now you have to.

The Seed design studio in Santa Ana is having a big MOOG THING Saturday evening with a showing of the documentary, performances on Moog synths, exhibit, etc. Looks neato.

As a friend and fellow reviewer said about Soul Man almost 20 years ago, this shit ain't funny.

( Special Olympics collaborate with Farrelly brothers on new movie )

If you're about my age, you grew up with an endless series of school science movies, narrated by soporific baritones, with muzak/porn 70s soundtracks, introduced by professorial types in their studies. Disney did them, everyone else did.

In a wonderful homage to this, Sega has made an ad site for their game "Full Auto" called Sega Labs.

They have the whole thing down, even the slightly out of sync sound and bad cuts. Plus, explosions. What's not to like?