I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: Philadelphia Radio Stations (circa 1990 and 2010)

There’s a Dead Milkmen song called “The Big Sleazy” in which the chorus is

“I hate MMR I hate YSP/You know that classic rock/Does not interest me.”

I’ve always been amused by the song, especially when I travel to Philly and hear these stations.  That song is from 1990, so 20 years later I’m not sure what the band would think of their new playlists.

But one thing I never really noticed before is the middle verse which is about one of my favorite Philly stations WXPN.  The verse is:

I hate what they’ve done to XPN
Those folk Nazis ruined my favorite station
I hate what they’ve done to XPN
If you hear it now it’s just a pale imitation.

Now, I have no idea what XPN was like before, but, yea, I can see that he folk Nazis are in charge.  Of course, I rather like that.  However, XPN also plays a bunch of artists who are broader than the folk label, so I wonder if they have changed even more since 1990.

History is fascinating, innit?

[READ: April 3, 2010] Trinity

Collins Gibson is a patron at our library.  He has been working on this book for a few years now.  The first time I looked at a bit of it, it was a novel.  I hadn’t seen him for a while and now he has brought the book back as a screenplay.

I didn’t read enough of the original novel to know whether this works better as a novel or a screenplay, but given the very visual nature of the story, it seems like screenplay fits the story better. And so, since Collins is a good guy, I’m going to do my part to get the word out about the story.

I’m not sure where Collins is from, but I recall that when there was civil unrest in Africa last year (only last year?) it affected his home country directly. And, in the story itself, there are some interesting vestiges of Africa scattered throughout.  There aren’t as many as I would have thought, but there are a few.

Since the story isn’t published, (and was only just finished), I’m not going to give away any details.  (You’ll get no secrets from me!)

So, it’s a sci-fi/revenge story.  Max is a young man whose DNA has been infiltrated by an alien creature named Tide.  The details of the story are pretty interesting.  And the technology present is pretty cool.  Max learns more and more about his life and his origins, and he draws more and more people into his life and his mission.

There’s a lot of violent sequences (personal violence done to even our hero) and then, later, conflagrations all across the city.

I admit to getting a bit confused from time to time (I’ve not really read all that many screenplays, so I’m not all that good at keeping characters together when I just see the names).  And there were a number of women in Max’s life who acted like a mother, so I wasn’t always sure who was who.

But the main criticism I have with the story is with Collins’ grasp of English.  For a while I though that maybe it was stylistic choice, but throughout the book, he leaves out a lot of direct and indirect articles.  So, we get sentences like: “He picks up gun and aims.”  Now, I know that in certain British parlance, articles are left out.  Take The Beautiful South song (which I have just blanked on, but in which he mentions that someone is “in hospital.”  I also heard this usage in a Red Dwarf episode that I watched last night.  So maybe it is intentional.  Of course, it tends to be awkward to read.  (And I can’t help but think it would make the dialogue sound very stilted).

But once I got past that, I thought the story was really compelling, and I really couldn’t put it down.  It is quite long for a screeenplay (typical 90 minute movies are 90-120 pages, this one is 150).  And if you don’t trust the numbering system, by the time you reach the sixth or seventh action sequence in a screenplay you think, hmm, this feels like one too many.

So, I hope that Collins is able to get this in the hands of someone with better connections to Hollywood than me.  And I hope his vision comes to fruition.  I’d love to see this story,