So back when, in my college days, I used to dance a lot – at live concerts especially, but also at parties on campus, social events, and whatnot. Somehow as I’ve aged I’ve become more reserved and self conscious about it and rarely if ever dance, to the point where it’s occasionally been an issue with my girlfriends over the last 10 years or so. I mention this because this weekend I visited my friends Dave and Lisa at their new place in Westport, MA, and Friday night we went to see Dark Star Orchestra, a Grateful Dead cover band. By the second song I was on my feet bopping with the rest of the crowd, without even thinking about it. I had a blast, and it definitely made me nostalgic for my free wheeling self back in the 80’s. It was the first time I’d seen DSO and they were great. I guess they often play actual setlists of Dead shows, but Friday they were just winging it, playing songs from many eras. The highlight was a 10-15 minute take on Alligator, which was less like Pigpen’s drunken bluesy take on it and more rock/jam band, but it was great and rocked the place.

I was also surprised to see how much dope folks were smoking. The show was in Lowell, MA, in a small concert hall, and there were only a couple of hundred people there, and I saw the cops drag out two folks and security track down several others, and yet still folks were smoking dope all over the place – great clouds of it were gushing up over the floor during the sets. Either these folks are fools (most likely) or the penalty for possession must be trivial in Massachusetts.

Anyway I had a blast, I’d definitely go see DSO again, they were great and the crowd scene brought back a lot of fun memories from my teen/early 20’s years.

I’ve mentioned a few times here how much I love live music, and how to escape paying the music company cartels I stopped buying cd’s years ago but kept grabbing live music whenever I could find legally available options, from places like archive.org for example. I recently found the Ultimate Bootleg Experience and it’s become one of my favorite feeds – just in the past couple of days I’ve grabbed a cool Stones show from ’72 with amazing audio quality, and a decent radiohead show from 2003, and over the past several weeks I’ve found all kinds of great stuff on the site. They consistently link to excellent concerts in a variety of genres. Add some variety to your daily listening by checking out the site or adding it to your RSS feeds.

So I got a Netflix account. It’s great, as anyone who has one already knows. I added a little widget to my site down on the right, to show what movies I have or most recently had out of Netflix so you can see what I’ve been watching. If you already have a Netflix account, you can add me as a friend using one of my spam email addresses – ask me for the details so I don’t have to post them here for the spam harvesters to grab.

Hard Knocks, the HBO series that follows an NFL team’s training camp, is back after a several year hiatus. This season they’re following the Kansas City Chiefs around. It’s a really great series if you’re an NFL fan or curious about the inner workings of professional sports. They covered the Cowboys and Ravens in previous seasons. I’m not sure why they dropped it for several years but I’m glad it’s back. Check it out, 10pm wednesdays starting the 8th of August.

Wow, what great fun this movie is. Paul Verhoeven’s Zwartboek (Black Book) is a great little spy thriller of a type you so rarely see these days. The plot follows the mostly unfortunate but always thrilling escapades of a young jewish singer in the Netherlands during the latter days of WWII. The pacing is fantastic, the plot has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing right up to the end, the heroine is beautiful, knows it, and shows it, and the acting and directing are both above average. Definitely check this out if you like spy thrillers. It’s subtitled though there is occasional english dialog, but look past that because if you don’t you’re missing out on a real treat.

…great. Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen it and don’t want to spoil it for yourself.

There’s lots of sturm and drang and angry fans bitching on the net about how unhappy they are with the ending. I thought it was great – it left things open to the viewer’s interpretation, with lots of possibilities to consider, and it fit perfectly with the ambiguity that was a central theme of the show over the years. Honestly, what did people want, that Tony should get whacked and be done with it? We’ve seen that ending in any number of mafia movies and personally I would have been a lot less satisfied with that ending, whereas what we have instead is an ending that lets you imagine Tony being whacked as one possibility amongst many. I can’t imagine a better ending, and it’s left everyone talking about it. What more could you ask for?

Neil Gaiman, who produced perhaps the best comic book series ever, The Sandman, and by far my favorite fantasist, has managed to get one of his novellas turned into a feature film with some major stars attached (De Niro, Claire Danes, Ricky Gervais, Peter O’Toole, Michelle Pfeiffer, and others). It’s coming out this summer, and is based on his novella ‘Stardust’ which I read and enjoyed. Here’s the Stardust entry on IMDB – this is definitely worth watching for when it gets to theaters later this summer.

Also as an aside, if you enjoy fantasy you owe it to yourself to check out The Sandman series Neil wrote. This is not men in tights comic books, this is fantasy on a grand scale with superb storytelling and great art. If you have a conception of comics as something kids read, this is the series that can change your mind. The first book is a bit uneven but 2-9 are just completely awesome. Check em out!

Fancy a tale of terror delivered to your podcast client every so often? Check out Pseudopod, a horror themed short fiction podcast. It’s very similar to Escape Pod, which I mentioned a while ago (I think they’re affiliated somehow) but focusing on a different genre.