Weekly Geekly Rundown for September 6th, 2024

Evel Knievel, Nostalgia, and More

The Most Gen X Weekly Geekly Oddity Ever

*** Warning this post contains extra nostalgia. Skip to the Weekly Film Article Cavalcade if you want to avoid those kinds of musings. ***

In what may be the first example of base jumping in the world the stuntman Evel Knievel attempted to launch a rocket cycle over the Snake River Canyon 50 years ago. The attempt failed because the rocket cycle’s parachute deployed early, a failure that almost resulted in Knievel’s death. It was a scenario with which Gen X kids would become very familiar. Evel Knievel would announce some daring stunt, only to nearly die in the attempt. As foolish as Knievel’s attempts were, they were inspiring and they are in many ways the defining events of Generation X’s formative years. Even those too young to see the events live heard about them and and friends or relatives how had action figures based on the events.

Technically base jumping began in the mid-1970s at Yosemite National Park, but the Perrine Bridge in Idaho Falls (the town where Knievel made his attempt) is the place where base jumping has become a true industry and where casual daredevils can attempt to base jump in tandem as if it was a perfectly safe and perfectly normal behavior.

When my family and I moved to the Boise area, we were unprepared for how much we could come to love the area. My fondest childhood memories are of Reno, Nevada and the surrounding areas. I remember riding my bicycle all over Sparks from friends house to friends house or to the movie theater. My life was very similar to the way Stranger Things presents Gen X kids lives. It was filled with sports (Soccer, Skiing, Wrestling, Baseball), Dungeons and/or Dragons, and riding my bike all around town with and without friends.

When I got older, the place became sadder. Not because of any societal shift or even due to the inevitable nostalgic sadness that comes with adulthood. It became sadder because while I was an undergraduate at the University of Nevada (of which I have tremendously fond memories), I also worked as a 21/Craps dealer at a couple of clubs downtown. It was then that I saw inside the sepulcher that was Reno and saw the rot underneath the comfortable tourism based Smallest City in the World.

Casinos are tremendously sad places. Not because tourists come and lose money, though they do. It is because on the 5th and 20th of every month a wave of lonely locals wander into the casinos ready to spend their recently deposited Social Security checks in exchange for a few moments of false friendship. I remember the regulars coming to the tables to chat. They were lonely. Their children had moved to Vegas, the Bay Area, or elsewhere to make their way while the parents remained in Reno, lonely and looking for someone who would listen. I was that listener for a mere minimum wage plus tips. All the while I watched them spend their money.

It transformed a beautiful town into a place of despair for me and I eventually moved to Los Angeles with my wife where we began our lives together and welcomed our daughters into the world. Los Angeles is still my favorite city, though when I talk about Los Angeles I mean from Riverside to Santa Barbara and from Valencia to San Clemente. It’s a vast and wonderful area. It is beautiful, but it is also a hectic and fast paced place that made me long for the Reno of my childhood, a Reno that doesn’t really exist.

Except it does exist. It’s just called Boise, Idaho. The Treasure Valley is everything I loved about my childhood in Reno without the casinos. It is a place where kids can ride their bikes everywhere and experience the beauty of the outdoors with only a few minutes drive and the Boise River is far superior to the Truckee any time of the year. Los Angeles is wonderful, but Boise is living nostalga.

That nostalgia only increased when my wife and I took the girls for a hike in Twin Falls where we stumbled across the site of Evel Knievel’s famous rocket cycle jump and we walked up the mound where he attempted his launch. I never saw the original launch, but I got to imagine it from that point and share the story with my daughters. Today marks the 50th Anniversary of Evel Knievel’s attempt to “jump” the Twin Falls section of Snake River Canyon in a rocket cycle. They couldn’t believe some one would try it, and neither could I.

That sense of daredevil excitement was very much rekindled for their generation when Felix Baumgartner jumped from the stratosphere to parachute to the Earth. We often forget how amazing the world we live in is and how many people are constantly pushing the edges of what is capable. We often find ourselves trapped in despair, but daredevils can remind us of both how fragile life is and how much pushing our limits and testing that fragility are worth the risk. I remember watching Baumgartner’s jump a few years ago. I called my daughters into the room, remembering the stories of Evel Knievel. It was only a few minutes into the jump when I asked myself, “what have I done? He’s spinning out of control and can die!”

Had I doomed my daughters to have a tragic memory of death? That thought captured all the fear that it is to be a parent, but in the end Baumgartner landed gracefully. It was a thing of beauty. That is the secret of life in general. We cannot let fear stop us from doing what we love. We must find a way to work together to overcome our fears and make wonderful memories. We may not be Knievel or Baumgartner, but we can be daredevils in our own way in a fight against despair. Let’s just remember to include those who need us in our battle.

Weekly Film Article Cavalcade

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

For the most part, I’ve enjoyed legacy sequels when they acknowledge the debt they owe the original property. I loved the first Stranger Things influenced Ghostbusters because it was essentially Field of Dreams with nuclear powered anti-ghost weapons and it hit me in the feels. When a legacy sequel shares my sense of nostalgia, I’m not just in I’m ALL IN.

Which makes it surprising to me as I read Luke Y. Thompson’s very positive review of Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, how unenthused it made me regarding the film. Every time I see a clip, or read a description, of the film it comes across as Hot Topic Beetlejuice with all of the cash grab but none of the genuine nostalgia. Then again, I’ve always had a bit of a philosophic clash with Tim Burton’s films. Growing up poor in a family that never owned a home, I viewed my friends’ suburban houses as a kind of paradise. Similarly, going into homes where the mom isn’t suffering from heroin addiction had a kind of charm that seemed otherworldly. So when a Burton film that critiqued suburbia hit the screens like Edward Scissorhands, I balked.

I didn’t balk at Beetlejuice. It was one of three films that convinced me that Michael Keaton should have been cast as The Joker in Burton’s Batman. The other two films were Pacific Heights and Tim Burton’s Batman. The scene where Bruce Wayne says “you wanna get nuts!” is a better Joker than anything Jack Nicholson offered which was more a Cesar Romero impersonation, as also demonstrated in the same scene. When Keaton is doing the build up, it’s a perfect Joker-esque explanation of why and how he came to be. That Burton saw Keaton as Batman and not the Joker is just one of the many (for me) demonstrations of his limitations as a director.

Luke does a great job of defending Burton in his non-Goth moments as a director. I still see Big Fish, which Luke doesn’t mention since he focuses on the more recent and underappreciated Big Eyes, as Burton’s best film. It’s the one where he isn’t drawing from a staid bag of tricks. Though to be fair, I love Frankenweenie (the short) and his adaptation of Sweeney Todd is very compelling even drawing genuine emotion from Johnny Depp that goes far beyond his limits as a vocalist. It captures the tragedy of that story well, but stylistically is a return to the German Expressionism so often associated with Burton.

All of which is my long way of saying that most Burton films resonate too strongly with the “Did you see that thing from the film you are supposed to like that I pried into the visuals of the movie?” mentality than with any real vision. And that too often when he has vision, it’s of the staid “suburbia is hell don’t you know” rage of rich Orange County/San Fernando Valley pseudo-punks, rather than an acknowledgement of actual suffering happening a mere five miles away south of Washington Boulevard.

Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat

While her particular critiques are different than my projected potential critics, Courtney Howard found Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice lacking in many ways and her review suggested that my intuition might be right regarding my feelings. She opens her piece with a discussion of directors who have revisited properties and her selection of films intrigued me. Among the list were Michael Mann’s Miami Vice and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Both are films I enjoy, but both are films that actually pale in comparison to their originals in many ways.

Weekly Geekly Rundown for July 7, 2023

When I recommended Michael Mann’s Thief last year in my July 7, 2023 Weekly Geekly, I mentioned how the film Miami Vice pulled a scene from an episode of Starsky and Hutch that Michael Mann wrote. The stakes are raised a touch in Miami Vice, but the set up and beats are the same. It also happens to be the best scene in Miami Vice the film, a film where no moment compares to the scene in the television pilot where Crockett calls his wife and then begins what might be his last drive as Phil Collins plays in the background. It’s a banger of a scene and nothing in Mann’s legacy film comes close to it, and I say this as someone who thinks this legacy film is great. It’s great, but pale compared to the original.

The same goes for The Man Who Knew Too Much. When Edna Best takes the rifle from a police officer and shoots Peter Lorre, thus saving her child’s life, it is a moment that never gets close to being matched by any action Doris Day takes in the sequel. Doris Day is among my 10 favorite actresses. Everything she does is divine. That includes her performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much, but she’s no Edna Best and her character is weaker and more trivial. Sometimes revisiting, even when it is good, isn’t all it can be. That’s Courtney’s point and it’s one I’ll keep in mind.

Glimpses from the Substackosphere and Bloggerverse

Thog's Table

offers some advice for making Original D&D Fighters more 3 dimensional in a recent post. The post echoes some of the innovations that I first encountered in the Arduin Grimoire and it’s advice that will inspire a full post from me this week or next.

Adding Some Simple Dimension To The OD&D Fighting-Man

My favorite authors are Jane Austen and Dashiell Hammett, but the one I am most in awe of is Walter B. Gibson. Not only was he the writer of The Shadow, numerous articles on Bunko, and the real author of Mark Wilson’s Complete Course in Magic (the book that introduced me to the art of illusion), he wrote over a million words a year for ten years straight and

Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry

has a recent post dedicated to his legacy.

A Million Words a Year For Ten Years Straight - Walter B. Gibson

J.Q. Graziano

gives us a glimpse at some of the art in old D&D modules in a post from last week. While I’m not as hard on the more recent illustrations in D&D rulebooks as some are, I really miss the days when D&D featured excellent black and white line art. There is far too much digitally painted stuff for my tastes. The lighting and texture of digital art is as distinctive, and to me hollow, as AI art. A lot of it is great, but it often leaves me wishing the artist had used a different medium.

THE ART of Old School D&D Modules

Who wants a Hüsker Dü inspired adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics? I do and thanks to

Matt Thompson

I know that one exists. I’ll definitely be checking it out.

Tron, Techno, & Hüsker Dü Inspired RPGs from Netcrawl's James Pozenel

Role Playing Game Recommendation

I’m pretty sure that the title sequence for Gerry Anderson’s UFO is one of the greatest opening sequences in the history of television. The music and imagery pop and every time I see it I’m jazzed to watch the show. It’s also a show that has a great premise.

You see, there’s a secret government agency that battles aliens who are attempting to attack our world. To protect people from the knowledge that aliens exist, and to keep the organization secret, the government agency is located beneath a movie production studio…a studio that makes films about fighting alien invasions. Hot damn is that a great idea and one I’d love to see done with non-Andersonian effects. As much as I love Thunderbirds and UFO, I’d love to see more realistic effects for this premise.

Sadly, no one has made an ITV/Gerry Anderson’s UFO role playing game, but the next best thing exists. Crooked Dice Studio’s 7TV miniature skirmish game is a game where players take the role of TV producers putting together shows for the 7TV network across a variety of genre. The television studio in the game is heavily based on ITV in its golden age and it’s a fantastically fun game that can be translated into role playing pretty easily.

Film Recommendation

This week’s film recommendation is an amateur documentary film rather than a big budget film or classic Hollywood film, but it’s an important film to see if you are interested in the origin of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game. Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons examines the contributions of gamers like David Arneson and David Wesely without whom we might never have seen D&D in print. David Wesely’s Braunstein adventures inspired David Arneson to create his Blackmoor game and it was playing in a Blackmoor game that inspired Gary Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons. No Braunstein, no Dungeons & Dragons. It really is that simple. It’s not the only influence, but it is a vital one.

Given that Gygax was a reader and commentator in the British Wargaming magazines, I still think that Gygax would have designed a role playing game without the Blackmoor experience, but it would have been very different had he not fought those 4 Balrogs in his first adventure as I described in my earlier post on Gygax’s first D&D-like experience. I think that the British Wargaming scene is overlooked when it comes to its influence on role playing games, but so too is the influence of David Wesely and the Braunstein and this video covers that ground in detail.

Gary Gygax's First D&D-like Experience

Music Recommendation

Since this is a very nostalgia driven Weekly Geekly, that means that I have to include some shoegaze. It’s the music of wistful nostalgia after all.

Ironically, listening to shoegaze made me think of some “classic” 90s one hit wonder alternative music and no one captures that vibe better than Duncan Sheik (except maybe Lisa Loeb). His song Barely Breathing is a great song to listen to and is relatively timeless and suggests an artist who could create a lot of classic tunes. He didn’t, but he did create one great one and that’s enough.

Speaking of great, Eric Johnson’s rendition of Cliffs of Dover from PBS’s Austin City Limits is an awe inspiring display of musicianship. I remember when my father showed it to me for the first time. I’d listened to a lot of “guitar gods” over the years and was a fan of people like Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, and Yngwie Malmsteen, but I’d never heard anything like what Eric was doing with Cliffs of Dover. It was a mixture of Jazz, classical, and rock. It was similar to prog rock, but it had a wonderful melody and lacked the kind of pretentiousness that prog rock often brings with it. Cliffs of Dover is a beautiful song that ranks up there with many of my favorite classical compositions for complexity and listenability. It is sublime.

Speaking of sublime, this performance of J.S. Bach’s Tocatta & Fugue BWV 565 on 11 String guitar by Moran Wasser is a delight. While the original was composed for the organ, and is used to magnificent effect at the beginning of Rollerball (and was used to magnificent effect by my childhood DM when he ran Ravenloft), this particular rendition let’s you see some of the subtleties that Bach incorporated in the composition and increased my already huge admiration for the piece.