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This is a blog post about my obsession with following space exploration activities. Originally I had my collection of web links here at the top, but in March 2009 I moved them to a separate post. Below is a chronicle of my history of my obsession, and our trip (ultimately unfruitful) down to Florida in December 2007 to see a Space Shuttle launch.

A Brief History Of My Obsession

I have been following the space shuttle program since the maiden voyage in 1981. I was listening live when Challenger exploded that day in 1986, and was watching the control room on NASA TV when Columbia burned up on entry that Saturday morning a few years ago. And countless other more minor events, such as launch sequence aborts, engine shutdowns during ascent, etc. So when I watch a countdown and launch, I see the milestones of history passing by. T-31 seconds, that’s when the GLS handover happens and the count used to abort there sometimes. T-3 seconds, that’s when the computers may decide that the engines haven’t ignited properly and it shuts them down (before launch). T+72 seconds, that’s when the SRB seal burnthrough finally ignited Challenger’s tank. T+120 seconds, that’s when the SRB firecrackers burn out, and the shuttle has made it out of the soupy atmosphere, and the worst of the launch risks are behind us, including the foam impacts that doomed Columbia. So a launch is exciting but also sobering since I am reminded of so much as it races through the process.

In 26 years of following the program, I’ve never actually seen a launch. Back in high school, I think the summer after we graduated, my friend Steve Krill and I flew down to Florida (on People Express!), stayed at his aunt’s vacant condo in Jupiter FL, and intended to drive up to KSC the next morning to see the launch. We overslept! We woke up 30 minutes before launch, jumped in the car and started driving, and 2 minutes before launch we steered over to the beach and watched from afar, still about 30 miles away.

Dec 2007 trip to Florida

So earlier this month Sharon and I drove down to Florida to see the launch of Atlantis, scheduled for Thursday Dec 6th at 4:30pm. I had access to the media viewing area, which at 3 miles from the pad is about as close as anyone can get! Except, of course, for the 7 guys strapped into the thing at the pad. …. Alas, I couldn’t get Sharon in so she’d be back at the KSC Visitors Center with the unwashed masses, about 8 miles away. The first photo shown here is of the big countdown clock that you see on TV — that’s where I would see the launch from, and I took that photo of the clock up close (note the annoyed heron in the background, lower right corner).

So, continuing the concept of my years of fanboy experience informing my viewing of the launch, I knew that getting the shuttle through tanking was a notable milestone in the countdown sequence. I remember STS-114 (the RTF mission) when those ECO sensors just drove them nuts with their fickle behavior. they did eventually get that mission off the pad, of course, but not until 3 weeks of hair pulling had passed. And several launches since then had gone without a peep from the ECO sensors. But I still knew that it was there, an experience from history to worry about.

We woke up on Thursday morning and I caught up on the countdown status as we got ready to head to KSC. I wanted to see them get through the tanking before we headed in. And at that moment, the ECO sensors had once again reared their ugly cryogenics heads, and our launch was scrubbed for the day.

Which turned into 2 days, and then 3. NASA came up with a justification for attempting again on Sunday, but that failed too with the same problem. And so the whole thing was scrubbed for the month. As I type this, a week later, NASA believes they’ve found the problem and they’re getting ready to try to launch again starting on Jan 10th. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get back down there for that attempt, but I’ll admit that I’ve been thinking “an 8 hour drive isn’t so hard, I can zip down and zip back, and only miss a day or so of work, or none at all if it’s on the weekend!” I dunno … it’s so hard to catch up again after being out of town …

[update Feb 2007: I got within one day of being able to head back down to FL to view the STS-122 launch, but alas it launched on time. Maybe next winter!]

So, back to the Florida trip just completed, we made the best of it and did a couple touristy things at Kennedy and then visited Sharon’s parents. At Kennedy we did the Up Close tour, which is a step up from the basic bus tour that comes with KSC admission, and takes you on a two-hour guided tour of several places:

• the International Space Station center, where we could see the modules ready to go up to the ISS on future missions (they also have a little museum area that has mockups of the modules, and that’s where I staged the goofy photo of me pretending to work in the Harmony Node above)
• the causeway and a panaromic view of all the launchpads, including the Atlas and Delta pads
• just outside the VAB, where you can see the soaring birds lazily circling alongside, catching thermals off the vast sides of the building (no visit inside though)
• the Shuttle Landing Facility, where a astronaut-polited T-38 zipped by
• the closest you can get to the shuttle pads, both 39A and 39B, by way of a visit to the “A/B Camera Stop”

We didn’t get to do the last one (the pad visit) because of the impending launch. And frankly I was a little underwhelmed by the tour, especially when I saw that regular tourists can get to the ISS center from the Saturn V site by bus. I was expecting to get a peek into an OPF, or at least a stop at one. Afterwards they left us at the new Saturn V building, where Sharon and I did the fun floating-in-space photo that you see here.

The other tour is called “Cape Canaveral: Then and Now” and takes you off in the direction of the old launch pads and the Air Force Space and Missile Museum.

Update: In March 2009 I went down again and was able to finally see a launch!

Earlier this year I bit the bullet and bought a flat panel high definition TV set. In the process I learned quite a few things, and I’d like to distill them down to a few key points here. A lot of these will likely be contrary to what you might hear elsewhere.

I assume that you already know the basics. Like the fact that any HD set, of any size of resolution, can scale and properly display any HD signal, so you’re not wondering if a 720p set can display 1080i (duh, it can). Like the tradeoffs of plasma vs LCD, and that LCD is killing plasma in a hurry.

In general, you want to hit the pricing sweet spot. Not too cheap that you have problems with the set from day one, and not so expensive that you regret spending all that cash for something that’s not going to age well, considering how rapidly the market is moving.

1. The big makers are the three S’s: Sony, Sharp and Samsung. You can’t go much wrong by buying one of these three. Yes, there are bargains out there by the likes of Vizio and Olevia et cetera, but you just have to spend an hour in the AVSforum threads for those models to find out what kinds of problems those people have to live with.

2. Avoid the higher end 1080p displays. I was really set on buying one of these, but what I found is that the higher pixel densities place demands on the manufacturing processes that the suppliers haven’t fixed yet. Maybe by 2009 they’ll have that figured out, but right now they don’t, and the consumer forums are infested with people bitching about uneven lighting, banding, and other flat panel artifacts that you would hope not to have to deal with on a $3000 display. Instead, buy a higher quality 720p model and you’ll never look back. Sets with a 720p resolution will still “wow” you and you won’t notice the difference if you sit more than 6 feet from your TV.

The only reason to consider 1080p sets is if you are buying 46 inches or larger, and in that case I think you are a fool. The prices are too volatile to invest that kind of money (like, $3000 and up) on a set that won’t give you half the features of an old CRT, just lots of square inches. You’ll regret it 2 years from now when they’ve perfected 120Hz refresh, black frame insertion, 5 lambda backlighting, and all sorts of other tech that’s going to be appearing in affordable models by then.

3. Don’t be afraid to get a modestly sized set. You ‘ll be pleasantly surprised how big a “small” 37 inch set looks in your living room. Sure, in the electronics store showroom it looks puny next to the bigger model, but once you get it home it looks a lot bigger. And you won’t be breaking the bank. Settle for a set between 37″ and 42″ for now. Check out this great little TV size calculator for help in visualizing what kind of improvements in image size you’ll be looking at.

4. Don’t worry about whether the set can do HDMI 1.3 . And don’t bother spending more than 2 minutes even trying to understand what that even means. It doesn’t matter. Read more here if you like.

The items above will save you hundreds of dollars because you won’t be artificially limiting yourself to displays that have 1080p resolution or HDMI 1.3 interface capability, and will save you a lot of grief because you won’t be dicking around with returning or repairing (or lamenting) that cheapo set you got.

5. Don’t get caught up in picture quality. Unless you are a cinematographer, or television editor, with suitably calibrated eyeballs, you just won’t notice any differences that can’t be simply corrected by adjusting the display settings. Or put another way, you’re likely to have the display settings all screwed up anyway (brightness cranked up, for example) so the slight differences in display model just aren’t going to make a difference. And certainly don’t compare the sets in a store; at best, the store staff will have them set wrong, and at worst they will game the settings to make a certain model look better because they’re trying to sell it. I’m including black level and contrast ratio in the things that you shouldn’t really care about.

6. DO get concerned about features. Brace yourself for a big step back, because these new flat panels are lacking a lot of the features, and careful design, that you may take for granted on your old CRT. Dual tuner picture in picture? Nope? Intelligent muting behavior? Nope. It’s going to take a few years for the manufacturers to remember how to do those things right again.

7. One feature in particular to scrutinize: zooming capability. All the sets will do the basic zoom modes (e.g 4:3 stretch) but the one to watch out for is whether the set can zoom digital signals. For example, let’s say you have an HD signal tuned in on the antenna, and for some stupid reason it is actually pillar boxed SD signal, and then WITHIN that SD frame they’ve letterboxed a movie. On some sets (I dare say most), you can’t zoom that so that the small 16:9 image fills your 16:9 display. And I’m not talking about stretching! You need to test whether your set can zoom a digital signal, without stretching distortion. Alas, mine can not, and it drives me nuts to see the thick black border around all four sides of the image.

8. If you are planning on using the tuner in the set, test the channel changing speed. These things change channels a LOT slower than old analog tuners — like a channel-to-channel time of 3 seconds. Think about that … 3 seconds of black every time you press the channel up button on the remote. I personally watch only over the air (OTA) channels and it’s a real drag when channel surfing.

9. You don’t have to buy special HD service from satellite or cable company. All of the TV stations in your metro area are on the air with their FREE HD signals! You can just hook up a small antenna on the back of the set, or better yet in your attic, and you will have the most gorgeous HD in the business. True, it’ll only be a dozen or so channels, but really do you need to see all that cable shite? For that much money per month? C’mon, it’s only TV. You watch mostly DVDs anyway, right? And if you must have your cable channels, you do NOT need to pay extra for HD, because all of your local network affiiliates (ABC, NBC, CBS, etc) will have their HD signals on your cable for free already. Just make sure your new set has a “QAM tuner” in it. Seriously, at least try this before forking over the extra money.

If you’re going to pay for HD service, get it from DirecTV satellite. They are WAY ahead of their competitors on the quanity and quality of their HD offerings. By January they will have 100 HD channels on the air, and all will be MPEG4 at healthy bitrates. Trust me on this one.

10. Do you have a digital video recorder (DVR)? It probably doesn’t do HD, which means you will have to plan on upgrading someday. You can live with standard def (SD) recording for now, though. In fact, if you’re going to watch OTA and not bother with cable or satellite, you are actually stuck with SD right now. Inexplicably, there are no standalone DVRs on the market that will record and playback OTA HD! Well, there’s the Tivo Series3 and HD models, but those require a monthly subscription fee. (Here’s a great Series3 analysis, by the way). You can get HD cable DVRs from the sat and cable companies, though they are generally inferior to independent DVRs. Hopefully the OTA HD DVR situation will improve soon …

That’s it! I tried to get this out in time for Black Friday, but whaddyagonnado …

Four things conspired to make Monday a great day for me.

1. I’m a complete space freak. Anything space or NASA, I’m all over it. I check on the Mars Rover status at least once a week and I’ve read Steve Squyres’ book. I keep up with shuttle orbiter processing. I’m a member of the Planetary Society and listen to Planetary Radio (an obscenely nerdy weekly radio show, carried on WREK on Sunday mornings). I’ve been running the SETI@Home screensaver number cruncher since the day they launched 8+ years ago (yes I believe in little green men). As a teenager, instead of posters of bikini-clad models and rock bands, I had glossy blowups of Saturn and Earth from space, and a big fat copy of the “Shuttle Operators Manual”. Oh, and I got an aerospace engineering degree from Georgia Tech many years ago, although that didn’t turn out to be much use, just enough to get me some money so I could go back and get a more useful degree.

Sooooanyway, there’s a space shuttle mission about to go up that launched Tuesday. And I’d been dutifully following NASA’s prep for that launch for 2 months: orbiter processing, rollover to VAB, stacking with the tank and SRBs, roll to pad, FRRs and press conferences, all of it. Most of it though the fine folks over at nasaspaceflight.com.

So on Friday night I recalled that I’d heard earlier this year (at a NASA presentation) that they were going to try to feed launch video in HD during the October launch. Hmmm, I wonder what happened to that? Some quick hunting around and …

Omigodomigodomigodomigodomigodomigodomigod NASA has launched their HD signal! It’s still an engineering test, and so they haven’t made a public announcement really, but there it is! It’s on the same satellite that carries the existing NASA TV to cable companies. This isn’t the direct-to-home satellite like Dish or DirecTV, this is a backend distribution sat like networks use; it’s C-band and requires a Big Ugly Dish. And sorry, not even close to being available on the net.

So that was Friday night. My immediate thought was of course “I need to see this ASAP” and of course I work for a very well known cable news network, so I knew I had access to the satellite infrastructure that could make it happen. Two days of blackberry emails later, and there I was working into work on a Sunday night to set it up. And it worked! The shuttle launchpad in HD!

So THEN some of the newsroom jocks get wind of this and now suddenly they went live with it on Tuesday morning. The HD version of this very well known cable news network launched a month and a half ago, and this is exactly the kind of material that is completely compelling in HD. So for the late morning launch, they fired up an HD control room, staffed it, etc, just to take advantage of what essentially popped into my head on Friday night. The freaking president of the company knows my name right now, and it is a very big company.

2. The Dalai Lama has been in Atlanta for a week, as part of festivities related to the launching of his official relationship with Emory. The concluding event for “The Visit” was a big gathering at Centennial Olympic Park today, with a stage full of dignitaries and many thousands in the park there to here him speak. It was quite remarkable. I’ve heard him speak before (never in person though) and he really should not be missed. If I find a transcript of the speech I will update this post. It’s truly powerful stuff.

3. We finally have some rain, and forecasts for rain all week. I’m not obsessed with my lawn, but I have put a reasonable amount of effort into it for the past 10 years and it’s painful to watch it die. I’ve promoted healthy root growth through regular elbow grease (and no chemicals) so it can withstand typical drought conditions, but this has pushed it too far. Hopefully even drizzling rain for a few days will help it survive until the drought breaks.

4. How to properly hug a baby*

* I am not a breeder, but I do love playing with other people’s young kids, and this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

WREK was named critical favorite radio station by Creative Loafing in their Best Of Atlanta issue this week. Congratulations to WREK! But …

This is utterly fascinating to me, having been a WREK insider for most of the past 20 years (note: I have been out of WREK pretty much since 2002). WREK today, to me, is a mess. Just utterly painful to listen to. A world-class institution like Georgia Tech, supposedly with a world-class student body, should be producing a student radio station that absolutely blows the doors off of anything in town. Things that WREK did beautifully in the past aren’t even a thought now. Those things that they are still doing are purely on the basis of inertia.

Back in 2000-2001 or so, when there was first serious talk about the WREK studio moving from its location in a remote corner of campus to a location that was in the dead center of campus, I was a loud (and lonely) protesting voice. WREK would A) die during the move, and B) have its musical mission diluted to pointlessness.

I had predicted that the move would kill WREK, because there was literally nobody around besides me who was making a serious effort to engineer the place, and completely ripping up a studio and rebuilding it at a new location is the most violent thing that you can do to any engineered facility like that. However, they did in fact pull off the move in 2004, and it is wholy due to the fact that two people (Thomas Hildebrandt and Jim Evans) came to WREK in the 2001-2002 timeframe and took over for me. Thomas was the first active, productive student Chief Engineer that WREK had had in nearly a DECADE. Without Thomas and Jim, there is no doubt in my mind that, at best, what WREK would have become is a couple of folding tables with an iPod and some microphones. No joke, that is what some college radio stations basically run on.

As for my 2nd prediction, that of devolution into musical and cultural irrelevance, I do think that is in fact happening. It was already happening years ago. WREK is now little different from any other 100-1500 watt college station that you will find in any US city, with virtually nothing left to make it truly unique. There are simply forces greater than WREK (that’s a whole other screed that I’ll post some day, yay!) that are working to make WREK a hollow shell of what it once was. So what you get now are average students, uninspired and uncreative, slouching their way through the day feebly crapping out something they call a radio station, and the listenership that used to be there is now on the internet. It’s a complete joke. The upside is that with WREK going more mainstream and having the more visible campus profile, they are in a better position to weather the attacks from the Georgia Tech administration, whether in the form of the Athletic Association’s desire to bring “professional” commentary to sports events, or in the form of the President’s office desire to satisfy a wealthy donor and muscle professional public radio into WREK’s powerful signal. I think WREK is going to beat both of those threats back, because more and more people know what WREK is and appreciate the principled stance that they take on their programming.

Which leads back to the CL accolade. Every year as far back as I can remember, CL routinely declares that WRAS is the best station. For the average reader of (and worker at) CL, I’m in complete agreement that WRAS’s tired corporate-wannabe college-fluff pop rotation programming is perfect, and WRAS runs an incredible tight ship. Occasionally CL would break things up and throw the award to WRFG. But this year CL was aware of the threats to WREK, having done two or three brief article s over the past year about them. So I think they decided to throw a bone to WREK, because I am certain that WREK could make great use of a “Best Of Atlanta” accolade right now to fend off the attacks, and CL probably knew that.

Props to WREK student management in running their defense. They’ve been doing exactly what I would be doing in that regard, namely getting the word out by raising their profile with the student body, exercising their alumni base, and engaging the press. I’ve said many times that the only way that WREK will win this is in the court of public opinion.

And godspeed to them in that.

At long last, after 5 years of thinking about it and 2 years of actually doing it, my migration to Linux is complete. The last step was to get my Palm handheld device (a Samsung i500 cell phone with integrated Palm capability, with a core group of rabid fans) syncing with the desktop machine, and I got that working in the past week.

Since 1998 I’d been running Windows 95 on a 350 MHz Pentium. Six years later it was barely hanging in there but working. In 2004 I started researching hardware and Linux distributions, having decided that Win95 was going to be my first and last foray into the wild world of Windows (prior to Win95 I was running OS/2 and DOS before that).

By December 2004 I had decided on and bought the hardware for the computer and was testing out Ubuntu Linux on it. Ubuntu Linux is perfect for me because of two critical design decisions: 1) they use the Debian platform, and 2) they standardized on Gnome instead of KDE. Linux folks will know what that means, and I’m not saying the alternatives are inferior, but it’s what I decided I needed to see in a distribution. As a result I was looking at Libranet for a while, but they were a really tiny operation with limited resources, and in 2004 Ubuntu popped up with exactly what I was looking for.

So, for pretty much all of 2005 I had Ubuntu running on the new computer, but it was banished to the floor under my desk and the Windows machine remained my primary machine. I was waiting for Ubuntu to mature, and for me to have the time to tackle the huge disruption to my workflow that this migration would be. Over the 2005/2006 New Years holiday I tackled the conversion and had migrated pretty much everything over to the new Linux machine by mid-January 2006, in particular my email. All that remained on the Windows machine was the Palm Desktop application, because there weren’t any Palm sync/desktop applications available in Linux that satisfied me. In April June 2006 Ubuntu came out with their 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) release and I upgraded the machine to it (that was a real nail-biter, I normally don’t do OS upgrades ever, but my data survived it).

Palm sync still didn’t work, so I was stuck with keeping the Windows machine running solely so that I could support the Palm. FYI, I live by my Palm device — everything I know is in there. So I used VNC and a KVM to maintain quick access to the Windows machine.

And there it stayed until this week. Since Oct 2006 I’ve been occupied with a family matter (discussed occasionally here) and so there was no way I was going to tackle moving this along. A few weeks ago I decided that I had a window of opportunity in early August to give it another shot. I’d also thought up a way to get around the sync problem. Last weekend I tried it and it worked. It worked!

So for the past week I’ve been trying out these new shoes and they fit well enough. I got the last of the Palm data (encrypted account passwords) transfered over to the Linux platform yesterday, and late last night I shut down the Windows computer. If nothing bubbles up by Wednesday, then it’s going in the basement and at long last we will have foot room under the desk!

Why Linux instead of Windows? I really have no patience for the crap that Microsoft pulls every time they release a new version of Windows, or even a “security update”. Applications suddenly work differently, multimedia functions break, file association get stolen by MS products, and so forth ad nauseum.

In a free / open source environment, I don’t have to worry about losing capabilities. For example, I have been tracking my finances since 1987 with the exact same Lotus 1-2-3 software package, first on DOS and then on OS/2. I see no compelling reason to migrate and have lots of reasons NOT to migrate (macros, menu familiarity, etc.) Windows dropped support for running DOS applications starting with XP (I think, might be 2K). On Linux, I spent 30 minutes dorking around with DosBox and now can run 1-2-3 just fine.

Firefox is great. Thunderbird (for email) is just OK, but is vastly configurable and expandable and certainly will continue to improve. VPN connections into work go smoothly. Security updates are exactly that: updates necessary to maintain the security of the machine, and nothing else. Multimedia can be a pain, but honestly I don’t care that much about it. Flash 9 finally works on Linux and that right there takes care of a lot.

In fact, that brings up the biggest problem with Ubuntu. Since they made the early design decision to only include completely free software in their basic distribution, that means that they can not include codecs for popular proprietary media formats. So the basic Ubuntu installation can not play mp3 audio, play Quicktime movies, play Window Media files, et cetera. You have to figure out how to add those things, and the process has been frankly ugly for me. Two add-on systems have popped up to try to address this: EasyUbuntu and Automatix. I did not use either of these when building my system, because they frankly scare me, and in fact this analysis of Automatix appears to confirm my fears. Hopefully by the time I get to doing the spring update, Ubuntu will have made this process a lot smoother.

Now I’m looking forward to Ubuntu’s next LTS update, version 8.04 in April 2008, when I’ll do a complete upgrade of the system (keep the /home partition and wipe/reinstall everything else). In that process I hope to clean up a lot of the multimedia crud that I’ve kludged together over the past two years just to get it minimally functional.

Nearly 3 years after buying the hardware and installing the software for the first time, and 9 years after I bought the Windows computer, it’s finally going into the basement. Hooray!

Update 28-Jun-2009: WREK repeated this show last week! Click here to listen (after Tue 30-Jun 7:30pm ET, click here). I checked with Allan and he’s working with Jim Pribble to put together a reunion show later this year, possibly including Tim Campion!

Also, since I posted this, one of the guys has created a Clobber page on MySpace, were you’ll find a handful of their studio recordings plus links to other folks and event news — www.myspace.com/clobberatlanta .

Last Tuesday night WREK aired a December 1996 performance of Clobber on the weekly show The Underground Recordings. UR is a show where they dig up old Live@WREK recordings out of the “underground” basement storage room and play them on air.

WREK has an automatic mp3 archive system, so I loaded those archive files up in a computer and edited it out the incidental crap before and after the show, and you can download that edited show here: http://www.eyedrum.org/clobber.mp3 (50 MB download)

Clobber was a great Atlanta band formed by a friend of mine, Allan Ross. Allan was (and probably still is) a master of the crunchy punk guitar sound favored by the likes of Jawbreaker, J Church, Jawbox and other J-named bands of the mid-90’s. And while Allan’s screamed vocals were a weak spot (he’s too big of a personality to share frontman roles onstage), the band was otherwise flat out incredible, with really good bass and drums backing Allan up front. Clobber started out with Allan and bassist Shannon Mulvaney teaming up and then luring drummer Tim Campion out of his post-Insane-Jane retirement to create the power trio. Shannon quickly left (probably due continuing demands of his other more, uh, popular bands) and was replaced by Jim Prible on bass. To itemize the bands that these guys had been in would take too much space, so suffice it to say that this was practically a supergroup in the Atlanta scene.

Here they are playing in WREK’s old studio, with Joe Whitaker doing his usual fantastic job of mixing the show. (Joe used to tell me that really good bands made mixing sound easy) I’m pretty sure of the lineup of Clobber playing here; of course it’s Allan on guitar and screaming, and Jim on bass, but while I thought it was Tim on drums at this point in time, it doesn’t quite sound like him to me and so it’s probably Joel Suttles (formerly of Mercyland, another great band) who came on board when Tim’s family duties mandated a final retirement from indie rock. Joel was OK but Tim was just about the planet’s most entertaining drummer to watch, kind of Keith Moon flailing with a Ringo Starr moptop bouncing around. Tim had a snappier drum style than Joel, but Joel still gets the job done. [update: it WAS Tim, see below]

As usual, they are absolutely smoking in this recording. I can just see Allan careening around with his heavy vintage Gibson guitar swinging, stomping on pedals and colliding with Prible. Jim is tearing through his bass lines, but he just stands there like Ox as if nothing’s happening with that shiteating grin on his face.

The first song and the 2nd half of their set were songs that made it to their CD released on Amy Potter’s Half Baked label (Crash Course In Humility), but the first half is mostly songs that weren’t released and which I’d forgotton about. Somehwere in the middle they cover a Chris Lopez song, perhaps from the Rock*A*Teens or maybe from his prior band. Allan’s guitar control is just incredible, typical for this kind of pop-punk band, rejecting the drunken bloozy Stones style favored by your average bar bands for a tighter, sober, workmanlike stop-start dynamic. Allan will probably claim he was drunk to excuse the mistakes that only he can hear, but I don’t buy it — it’s just on. Only occasionally does he resort to a gratuitous pick slide 🙂

This is actually one of their last performances. They played their last show a couple weeks later at Dottie’s, then the guys went their separate ways (Allan moved to Seattle).

In an odd coincidence, I will actually be meeting up with Allan in New York next week, seeing him for the first time since he moved away from Atlanta a decade ago to become a rock star (or at least be very close to rock stars). I’ll update this post with corrections when I get back.

[update: Allan’s doing great. He said that at the time of this show, Joel had just left the band, so Allan talked Tim into coming back and just helping finish out the last few shows of the band’s career. Cool. Allan says they knew this would be essentially their last recording session so they used the first half of the set to capture songs that hadn’t been recorded yet. And to bust ass on the performance in general.]

Listen to the show!

A recap of the festival … in short, most of the screenings I attended were rather good, with just a few real stinkers among them. In past years it’s been more of a spectrum between good and bad, but this time it was pretty stark. On the other hand, I have to say I wasn’t just blown away by anything, but that could be the exhaustion speaking.

IMAGE continues to have one central problem with the festival: they don’t use thir own email list to notify members of cancellations! There were at least two screenings cancelled that I know of, and there was not a peep on the IMAGE mailing list about it (which I am on). I heard that their email guy quit on the eve of the festival start (nice way to burn your bridges, dude) so perhaps that played into it. However they’ve NEVER done this (notified of cancellation of sreenings) so I doubt it.

They had lots of aspect ratio problems early on (and not just in the fancy Sony theater) but about halfway through the week those seemed to be resolved. By the way, the Sony 4K projections in Landmark’s theater #8 were gorrrrrgeous.

It was flat out great to have the whole festival in one place (Landmark Midtown) and have that place be among restaurants and a short walk from Piedmont Park. The downside is that they had to move the festival up to April to get that much of the Landmark for that long, and it sucks sitting in a theater during the best weather that Atlanta offers (April).

Some highlights:

Narratives:

TV Set: AFF / IMDB / website Murder Party: AFF / IMDB / website Killer Of Sheep: AFF / IMDB / website Hamilton: AFF / IMDB / website The King And The Clown: AFF / IMDB / website La Vie En Rose: AFF / IMDB / website

Documentaries: The Blood Of Yingzhou District: AFF / IMDB / website Sari’s Mother: AFF / IMDB / website The Paper: AFF / IMDB / website Sacred Sights Of The Dalai Lamas: AFF / IMDB / website Kamp Katrina: AFF / IMDB / website Someone Else’s War: AFF / IMDB / website

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

The Killer Within — A really great documentary, perhaps the best I’ve seen at the whole festival. There’s nothing inventive about the filmmaking, it’s just a well-crafted telling of the story of a man who decides to stop keeping his secret, and the complicated results of his decision to go public with it. Fascinating insights into a complex situation. It’s been winning awards, so should appear on PBS this year, I’d hope.

Documentary Shorts 2 — Nearly a complete waste of time. Projection problems on top of a remarkably weak slate of material.

American Fugitive — Put me to sleep, and I think that may be a lifetime first for me! Could have been at least 30 minutes shorter; valuable historical context came far too late. I’m fascinated by the political history of Iran, so it was nice that this turned out to be essentially about the late 70’s / early 80’s Iranian revolution. If the filmmaker can figure out how to edit around the mindnumbingly slow pacing of the principal’s speech, and cut it down to less than an hour, he might have something worth picking up on PBS.

La Vie En Rose — good biopic; I was concerned about its length (2.5 hours) going in, but I didn’t notice it, which I guess is a pretty good endorsement. I was familiar with Edith Piaf’s singing but not a single bit of her story. This will be in theaters in the summer — go see it!

The Insurgents — I’ve been really conflicted about this narrative. On the one hand, I’m right with them on the politics, how reasonable and intelligent people can just get so pissed off about the raping of our democracy that they decide to resort to terrorism as a means of expression. But on the other hand, the actors that they cast for this were so impossibly attractive it pushed it over into cheesy. There’s no way I’m going to believe that Hottie Chick and Ripped Dude are going to form a terrorist cell and smash the state. Made for a nice sex scene though. Ha!

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

Milk In The Land — I don’t see how anyone can take this seriously when they’ve selected obvious crackpots as their talking heads, don’t have enough functional intelligence to spell “concise” correctly, use “its” and “it’s” improperly, and can’t do the most basic sound mastering (leveling) so that the audience doesn’t have to stick its fingers in its ears half the time. A fascinating story of corporate distortion, propaganda and profiteering, unfortunately buried in a pretty badly executed documentary.

Our Land, Our Life — I think this is the point when I really started to feel worn down by the endless string of documentaries showing us, in detail, how our own government is screwing us. In this case, the victims are the Western Shoshone native Americans, and the root cause is mining concerns wanting to tear up the land that the Shoshone happen to own and live on.

Soldiers Of Conscience — This felt a little weird, what with the flags and stirring music and all. I’m guessing that it was produced by a church, since it seems to show the soldiers (who have decided to become Conscientious Objectors) coming to their decisions by way of Christian theological arguments. If you can ignore the slight schmaltz that results from a serious documentary being made by Ned Flanders, it’s a good doc.

The King And The Clown — A ton of fun and an entertaining window into medieval Korean history and the imperial courts. The acting was a bit broad, and this is no Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or even Farewell My Concubine, but it was worth watching.

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

Hamilton — this is one of those unique films done in the narrative style where there simply isn;t much dialogue on screen; you just set up the shots and situations and let it play out over long, quiet scenes. You are left to wonder what’s happening exactly, try to fill in details yourself, a lot is left to imagination or conjecture, with an occasional morsel of information to narrow down the possibilities of what’s going on, your imagination at work. Beautiful and meditative, shot by Jeremy Saulnier who also directed the completely different Murder Party, also well done. Watch that name.

Kamp Katrina — a couple opens their N.O. backyard as a tent city; poor white trash, surrounded by drugs and alcohol, all trying to hold onto the creaky but stable life that they’d managed to eke out for themselves pre-Katrina, but many find themselved descending into despair and homelessness. Government support utterly nonexistent. It was nearly over before I realized it was just white people they were showing, no blacks. Yet another facet to the Katrina story.

Documentary Shorts I — six shorts, I’ll only write about three:

My 9/11: at this point I guess it’s pretty hard to NOT do a 9/11 documentary that has sweeping emotional power. This one, by established Dutch filmmaker Tjebbo Penning, is a simple personal video letter to his family and friends (ostensibly to his future grown son), where he takes the simple footage of that day at home in Lower Manhattan and adds voiceover. While the reality of the situation was right outside his window, he still was drawn to watch and get confirmation of that reality from the TV set in the other direction. And how watching the hole in the building with his naked eyes didn’t really evoke emotion, but the later litanies of victims did. But that was after it all had been confirmed as real by outside agents.

Someone Else’s War — excellent documentary about “Third Country Nationals” (TCNs) that are hired as laborers by military contractors to do the dirty work (literally) that U.S. troops used to do. Sure, American contractors are making $75K and up, but these imported labors are making a tiny fraction of that, and often are defrauded of even that. Coming primarily from India, Nepal and the Philippines, these are basically poor people who are tricked by local agents into going to Iraq to make money, but find themselves trapped in situations that at best get them back home with no more money than they left with, and at worst get them killed and buried in a foreign land, far from the families that need them.

The Fighting Cholitas — hilarious! I find it hard to believe that it’s true, but it certainly looked real. Poor Bolivian women take on careers as professional wrestlers, skirts and all.