SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-3rd Annual Green Sprouts Music Week Night 5 (Ultrasound Showbar, Toronto Ontario September 20 1995).
It has been a while since I’ve listened to a live Rheostatics show. Darrin at Rheostatics Live has added a number of new shows in the last eight months. Like this full week of shows from the Third Green Sprouts Music Week.
Fifth night of the third annual Green Sprouts Music Week held at Ultrasound Showbar September 18-23 1995. The first song is Tim Vesely performing a rap he wrote along with Farm Fresh and Rheos and then perfected the following night. If you ever listened to or attended all the shows of a GSMW run you know how the band kind of builds through the week and really hits a stride a few shows in – this is one of those types of shows. Interesting to hear how even within single songs they were working on the transformation from night to night as they worked them out in front of a crowd – Desert Island Poem aka Drumheller is a great example. Song Of Flight/California Dreamiline/Digital Beach/Earth is a particularly great run from this show. Don sings Never Forget for the second time and also second time ever singing lead at a live show. Sweet Rich Beautiful Mine features Tamara Williamson who co-wrote the song. All in all a great show. It is funny looking back at shows that have the impression of classic setlists but in fact half of the songs had not even been recorded yet and were pretty unfamiliar to fans.
This recording opens with a freestyle rap from Farm Fresh. I’m assuming that’s Tim on bass, and maybe someone else joining them?
Farm Fresh (Tyler, Pat and Ronnie) does “Space Song” and then Tim does a great story-rap about touring and listening to the Farm Fresh cassette and really loving it. is tim playing bass with them
Then Farm Fresh does some more rapping and when they leave someone (Don?) says that seriously they fought over the Farm Fresh tape–which van would get to listen to it.
When everyone leaves there’s some weird swirling music that lingers while martin starts “A Mid-Winter Night’s Dream.” He can’t reach the high note at the end–his voice kind of craps out but it’s still good. The jam at the end makes up for it.
There’s a raw “Feed Yourself.” Dave has changed “like a box of chocolates or a Beatles song” to “like Preston Sturges or a Beatles song.” But they get the crashing end part perfect.
Tim’s “All the Same Eyes” has some fun harmonics on the second guitar.
Dave says: Friday night is rock night. Each night is a like a snowflake–each one is unique. Like, Martin’s guitar did not break down last night during that song. And the new songs we have not yet worked out our dance moves yet. Donny was playing the lower drums with his hands and the hi-hat with his feet.
Tim: and the crash cymbals with his teeth.
Dave: I aspire to have all gold teeth like Sticky Thompson in Ziggy Marley’s group.
They begin “Aliens” which I thought would make everyone pretty excited. But there’s a lot of chatter. At the end, Dave says, “that was nearly my chance to grab the brass ring of lead guitar.”
There’s a screaming person in the crowd again and Dave says, “nice scream. We hear you.”
There’s a long tech delay so they do “My First Rock Concert.” Dave asks, “Does everyone know who ELO was?” When it’s done Martin says that was the mystery song. We’ve never rehearsed it, we just let it develop live. Dave then talks about the five flash pots and asks if the guy from the Yardbirds died when a flash pot blew up in his face. Or is that like the pop rocks guy story. Someone shouts Same guy!
Dave asks, Martin, if we play “Four Little Songs” will that cheer you up? It will. During Dave’s part he asks, “who votes for a guitar solo?” The 4321 at the end is perfect and at the end (“now they’re gone”) he asks several people if “you took them?”
The noisy crowd continues to irritate. Dave wishes there was a button you could use to highlight something or other and then Don says, a button to eject screaming fan. Or let them live? Someone shouts “make them buy beer.” Then as Tim starts the next quiet song someone shouts “shut the fuck up!”
Tim get a few songs now. “Connecting Flights” and “An Offer” (It’s only the third time we’ve played this, so be gentle). The falsetto seems a bit of a struggle.
Then comes Don’s song, “Never Forget.” Dave asks if he ever sang in his old new wave band. Only backing vocals. “Last night was the first time I was completely naked in front of the people.” So Dave introduces: Second time for the Don Kerr Band.
Dave invites Tyler from Farm Fresh on stage, but they are doing an interview. They play “Drumheller” (or “Desert Island Poem” as it’s also called). Drumheller’s a weird place man. We had great Greek food there once and terrible Greek food in the same restaurant.
As Martin plays a gorgeous “Song of Flight” he makes cool whale sounds. (Whales lived in Canada once). It segues into a lovely “California Dreamline” and then into “Digital Beach” and then into a wild “Earth/Monstrous Hummingbirds.” It’s, as Darrin says a great sixteen minutes.
Someone asks if “Earth” is about Dave’s family. Bidinis were the first humans.
Someone shouts “Winnie Cooper.” Dave: “The Wonder Years? I don’t follow. Lets meet outback later and talk about it.”
A ripping “Queer” come next with a “riff so nice, play it twice.” Dave messes up some words (which hardly ever happens). There’s a jam of the intro to “King of the Past” but no vocals. Did Tim just not want to play it?
Tamara from Mrs. Torrance is invited up, and while Dave is talking he says to someone “Hey don’t fuck with me” (!) [What happened?] Dave: I wish we wouldn’t swear as much, but we don’t swear as much as the guys in Farm Fresh do.
Tamara wrote the chorus to “Sweet Rich Beautiful Mine.” The two of them singing this together gives me goose bumps. Martin says: “That song was for Winnie Cooper.” Dave: How do you know about The Wonder Years? Martin: “Late at night, lonely, kind of lukewarm depressed.”
Dave: Was she like the Miss Beedle? [from Little House on the Prairie]. Martin: No, she’s like Jan.
Up next is “Fat” with a great jam at the end. Martin says “You hurt me with your rocking.” And then proceeds to rock out a cover of jane Siberry “One more Colour.”
The recording cuts off after about a minute of “Fan Letter to Michael Jackson,” so who knows what else happened on this Friday night.
[READ: February 12, 2020] Ready Player Two
I really enjoyed Ready Player One quite a lot. It was certainly one of my favorite books of the year. I didn’t know there was supposed to be a sequel, but when I heard about it, I imagined it might be a lot of fun.
And while the book is largely the same in structure, the tone of it was really disappointing to me.
Set several years after the events of the first book, Wade (Parzival) and his helpers Aech, Daito, and Art3mis are all in charge of the empire that controls the OASIS. They have bought out their competition and are basically a giant monopoly. They are the only company making legit equipment to access the OASIS and each of them multi-billionaires.
They do a lot of philanthropic activities, especially when it comes to giving poorer people access to the OASIS. And each one of them his his and her own pet causes to which they donate millions of dollars. But primarily they (or at least Wade) is taking care of himself. His house is palatial and costs billions of dollars. He has made everything fit his heart’s (nerdy) and he wants for nothing. Much of his money and energy is spent on building security measures for himself.
At the end of the last book and the flashback in this one, Parzival and Art3mis are an item. They won the challenge together and had some intimate moments together. Although they were only together for a week before what’s about to happen occured, Parzival was deeply in love with Art3mis. It’s not clear if the feeling was fully mutual since we don’t see Artemis’ POV.
But what has happened new technology that their company has released has put a rift between himself (and Aech and Diato) and Art3mis. The last thing that James Halliday did before he died was to create a headset. When you put the headset on, it latches into your brain an allows you to enter the OASIS in 100% full body, immersive VR. You can feel everything good and bad (although the machine doesn’t allow you to feel too much pain–there are limits). Before this, the OASIS was VR and very real, but this has now added all of the senses to the experience. It is so fully immersive that the system shuts itself off after 12 hours of use so that people don’t become zombies.
Parzival discovered the headsets soon after he took over at the headquarters. There was a note warning about the dangers of the headset, but once Wade tried it out, he was hooked. As were Aech and Daito. You can upload videos of yourself and have others experience things from your POV. Essentially you can become anyone for as long as you like.
Art3mis is 100% against this. She thinks it’s a terrible idea to allow the machine to have total access to your mind. And when the other three vote her down she refuses to use the device and refuses to speak to Wade.
Once they had hit 7,777,777 users a new challenge came up from Halladay. He had to find The Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul. But this new quest was very hard. And it was only for Wade to participate in–the shards could only be “touched” by Hallidays’ heir. But as soon as the quest began, his avatar indicated that he was on the quest–so the whole world knew about it.
Parzival had spent a few years looking for anything that might help him out but couldn’t find anything. He ultimately posted a promise that if anyone could help him find any of the shards he would give that person 1 billion dollars.
Noting happened for a time and then he got a message from L0hengrin, a young player who basically worshipped Wade and his crew. She had found a clue and directed Wade were the shard was (she couldn’t “touch” it. Wade was true to his word and gave her 1 billion dollars. Lo had plans to share her wealth with her friends who were poor kids who grew up in the trashy apartment blocks just like Wade had done. This was my favorite part of the book, I loved hearing about Lo’s plans and her friends. She essentially became like Wade in the original book. But she is not used very much, which is a bummer.
The puzzle is essentially about Halliday’s obsession with his co-creators wife, Kira. As the book goes on, we learn that Halliday had a huge thing for Kira but because she was clearly in love with Og (Ogden Morrow), James was always little bitter.
One of the things that I appreciated about this book was the course correctives Wade’s character went on. He learns that Kira was just as important to the creation of the OASIS as Og and James. He learns that Kira’s contributions were deliberately overshadowed by James who was jealous and sexist. Art3mis had tried to tell him about how important Kira was, but he refused to see it, believing that James and og were the gods. There’s also a later part where he talks about how the new gear has made people be more tolerant because they have been able to live the lives of so many different kinds of people–race, sexual orientation, beliefs. It was much easier to empathize with people because you could live their lives. I thought it was a nice touch .
But anyhow, the quest is undertaken by understanding what Kira loved most. James is clearly leading Wade on a quest for Kira (who died in real life, although Og was still alive). With every shard that Wade finds he experiences a small fragment of Kira’s life when she was alive. He has no idea how Halliday was able to record them because some were from before he even knew Kira. But these memories feel very real.
So after 100 pages or so, the story becomes another quest. But like any good sequel Cline has upped the ante. Because after Parzival gets the first shard several things happen.
In real life Ogden Moor vanished. He never used one of the new headsets either, so he able to go off the grid a little more easily than others might. Sorrentino (the bad guy from book one who was eventually put in prison for being such a bad guy) escaped from jail (in real life). While the four heads of the company were meeting to discuss this, Halliday’s avatar appeared before them. But this avatar of Halladay was actually Halliday’s online profile Anorak come to life as AI. Anorak was Halliday but with certain memories removed. Halliday thought that is he could remove his feelings for Kira, he would be a better all around person. But messing with people’s minds never works. And basically Anorak has gone berserk. He tells Wade and the others that everyone presently logged into the OASIS will be permanently locked in unless Parzival finds all of the shards in the alloted time. If wade takes more than 12 hours, he will suffer from brain death from the head set.
Obviously the four of them are 100% on board to try to save humanity. Art3mis is even kind enough not to say I told you so. Although I have to question Art3mis’ sudden change of heart about this man she couldn’t even look at moments earlier. It’s not exactly that the quest starts and she comes running into his arms, but it is kind of close. She is sympathetic to his plight so she’s encouraging him, but it seems to become romantic pretty quickly.
The quests require a deep knowledge of things that Kira loved most. Most of this information was available for the taking if you bothered to find it. And many people did. Wade certainly knew a lot about Kira, but not as much as was needed to complete this quest. Good thing he has friends.
First, Wade must defeat Ninja Princes. I enjoyed the backstory of this how Ninja Princes was an early game created by Rieko Kodama. It was very successful in japan, but when the game was exported to the U.S. it was given a male protagonist because it was suspected that American boys wouldn’t play a game as a princess. Daito is a master at the game and helps him through it.
The second contest takes them to Shermer Illinois, home of the movies from John Hughes. If you like John Hughes moves you can totally geek out on this section. At times it was bit much even for me but it was fun to relive some of the scenes and to see the way he made the scenes new, too.
Although, like the opulence in the beginning, I feel like this would be more fun to see than to read.
In this one we find out (and I assume this is all true) that Robert Downey Jr was originally supposed to be play Duckie in Pretty in Pink and that he was supposed to win Molly Ringwald’s heart at the end. But test audiences didn’t like that so Hughes changed it for her to go off with Blaine.
The next section is all about Prince. There’s an interesting component to this in that the book suggests that there are 7 phases of Prince’s career and it contrasts them to Morris Day and the Time.
But overall, I found this Prince quest to be really….wrong. Wade doesn’t know much about Prince, so this quest is up to Aech. But what’s weird about this quest is that you don’t really need to know a lot about prince or his music. There’s lots of things you need to acquire and do before the final battle. But that’s the thing, you win by battling Prince. It’ as if Prince were a bad guy who you have to defeat. And you don’t defeat him in like a guitar battle, you defeat him by hitting him with sonic chords (or something).
The final quest is based around The Lord of the Rings or more specifically the Simarillion. This is an unwinnable fight unless you know a lot about obscure Tolkien–which Artemis does.
Once Wade collects all of the shards, he has to deal with the crazy AI that is Anorak. Because who knows if he will keep his word and let the trapped OASIS users go.
This book felt a lot less joyous than the first. In the first one there was that whole underdog fighting against the forces of evil which was fun in itself. Plus, Wade was an unhappy kid in a bad situation and he had a feeling of hopeful excitement in geeking out on things he loved. But this one wasn’t geeking out for fun it was geeking out for survival and no one really wants to have to do that I don’t think.
The very end of the book is a utopian moment which was simultaneously very nice but also rather creepy. I’m wish that Wade could have spent more time with Lo.
Having said all that, the book was certainly fun and I couldn’t put it down. It was nice to be back in that world as well, but whereas I’d want to re-read the first book, I don’t think I’d re-read this one.
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