Jeremy Bent

High School Musical, like it or not, represents an enormously powerful and lucrative brand for Disney. I’ve tried to find numbers on how much cash that the behemoth (set to pop with its third incarnation coming to theaters today) has brought in, but no dice. I did see that the combined budgets of all three films are still under $25 million, so to say that Disney has likely made its money back on the franchise is, if anything, a gross understatement. Admittedly, the first two installments were television-only (big cost cut there), and their entire cast was essentially a non-entity prior to the first one (and are likely to still be under the same contract for this third one, hence the budget of a paltry $14 mil for HSM3). But I’m guessing the gross of the franchise is probably closing in on the billion mark faster than you’d think. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got a pretty long-standing love affair with video games. Although I liked playing them as much as most kids of the 80s, I think I can trace the obsession back to the fall of 1993. I was in sixth grade, and my friend Cliff bought Final Fantasy (the orig) for the NES at a garage sale for like $15. We played it for like ten hours straight - first at his house, and then Cliff coming back to my house to sleep over so we could keep playing. Computer games were a pretty big constant in my house with my programmer brother and former computer salesman father, but when I got the SNES (and later, the Playstation), my obsession exploded. If it was made by Squaresoft and released in America, I probably played and beat it at some point between 1995 and 1999.

This was more or less pre-Internet. Admittedly, I lived in a stronghold of tech nerds, so we had a modem back in 1990, when there was nothing to see, and I think I registered my first Yahoo! mail account in 1996. But when I say pre-Internet, I mean Internet as we know it now, a well-organized resource with thousands of people contributing information for no apparent gain. Which is to say, I beat most, if not all of these games, without consulting some kind of strategy guide or walkthrough. I believe I used to pride myself on the fact that I could make it through these games without resorting to buying the $15 guide most of my friends relied on. I’m pretty sure I considered that cheating. Read the rest of this entry »

Easily one of my least favorite subplot of the upcoming election is how frequently the Republican ticket, Sarah Palin especially, are referencing Reagan, as if he were some sort of political savior. Palin seems to think that the American people believe that had we all put our trust in Reagan, the country would be soaring on golden wings towards a prosperous future. A future that doesn’t recognize gays or minorities as having a place in our society. A future where misguided trickle-down economics, huge tax cuts for the rich, and deregulation create an economic system that does nothing for anyone who isn’t already part of America’s most wealthy.

I’m not a Reagan fan. I find the clinging by conservatives to his white-washed patrician values extremely upsetting. It speaks of self-interest, and of reactionary behavior that’s been far too prevalent in this decade. Attaching his name to your campaign could not say more about your complete disinterest in the middle class; for despite his winning rhetoric with Middle America, the middle classes bore far more of the burden during his presidency. I don’t understand why people feel the need to lionize him so, but let’s just add that to the list of things I don’t understand about politics.

But please, Republicans: A moratorium on invoking Reagan in speeches, debates, et al. You’re not winning any new fans, and even Reagan’s die-hard fans among the very wealthy are having trouble swallowing the comparison given the economic woes of late. We’re not impressed, and what’s more, your opponent’s been mentioned in the same breath with someone a little bit more impressive.

Two people who had never seen me before separately came to the conclusion that I looked like David Hasselhoff.

“But like a young David Hasselhoff!” they said, trying to soothe my horrified reaction.

Damage done, ladies. Time to get this mop chopped.

I can’t stop quoting Joseph Campbell, but apparently he can’t stop being incredibly insightful.

Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favorite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate.

That’s how long I’ve been in New York. I rolled in here on a Dominican shuttle bus three years ago today and had to take a cab 70 blocks to my friend Bob’s apartment because they didn’t go below 125th St. Blame my dad. The more I think about my move to New York, the more I realize how terribly, terribly unprepared I was. I am shocked my mother didn’t run after that ramshackle passenger van, yelling, “Come back! Come back! You don’t even have a job! Or any prospects! Or a direction in life! Let me bake for you!”

The last couple years I’ve been posting little life reviews at the anniversary mark that look at how far I’ve come since moving here. Considering I started with next to nothing (handful of cash and about three friends in the area), I think I’ve made significant progress. I don’t think I need to review whether the move was a success or not any more. Still, what strikes me now, as my life is going about as well I would expect at year 25, I’m not sure why I wanted to come to New York so badly. I’m glad I did, and I think it’s done a lot for me in almost every aspect of my life, but I’m still curious as to why I was dead set on NYC, considering I had only been here twice before, for only hours at a time.

Being from a small town in a pretty marginal state gave me a desire to be where things are happening. Although that’s true of me, and not so much true for almost everyone I went to school with in Rhode Island. I was perenially bored in Coventry (which was obviously not all RI’s fault), but now I’m perenially busy with things I really enjoy in NYC. I suppose most of the things I do now I could’ve done in Rhode Island, but there’s something about being in New York that engenders a can-be-done, let’s-try-this sort of mentality. You see people making cool things and doing great stuff all the time; it’s natural you want to join in.

So no more reviews. My goal in this next year is to try and quantify why it is that I like New York City so much. I figure that will probably take me a while.

I’ve been teaching myself the ways of the surprisingly robust Little Sound DJ, a composition tool and music tracker for the Nintendo Game Boy. Coming off the musical high of working with the Apple Sisters, I wanted to keep pushing my brain towards musical endeavors. I got seriously inspired watching the chiptune documentary, Reformat the Planet, and I’d thought I’d try my hand at some 8 bit music.

It’s been interesting. The learning curve on LSDJ is not bad for a program on a system with only 8 buttons. It would’ve been wildly unsuccessful as an actual Game Boy game, because you really do need to read the manual and know how to navigate it, etc. What really shocks me though is how broad the functionality of the program is. Considering the Game Boy is a 20 year old piece of techonology, it’s impressive that you can have it run all of this wave synthesis and so forth with surprisingly complex sound.

I nabbed an old school GB off of ebay the other day, so as soon as I feel comfortable enough with it, I’m going to get the necessary equipment to make my own carts and start playing music off of it. My goal is to come up with a few songs and maybe play an open mike night. There’s a popular one down the street from my apt. that I’d like to perform at if I get some material I like. At the moment I’m torn between whether to keep it all on the Game Boy or to play bass under whatever melody/beat combo I come up with. I assume this will resolve itself when I’ve got things a little more fleshed out. Right now my compositions are more “ringtone” than “actual song.”

From Hero With A Thousand Faces:

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended upon the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.

Bam. J. Campbell just served you, fundamentalists. If you have any interest in the spiritual traditions of the entire planet, you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book.

I’ve been thinking “I can do this” more than I ever have previously in my life. I mean it in the sense of, “If I devote enough time and energy to this, I can accomplish this and accomplish it well.” Cases in point:

-Roller derby: possibly the jumping off point for all this positivity. I started working with the league a year ago, barely being able to skate on quads, not knowing the rules, etc. Now I skate better than 99% of the population (although still one of the worst in the league) and ref with one of the most respected leagues in the country. One year.

-Novel: Although my progress has slackened significantly, I started working on a novel earlier this year independent of NaNoWriMo and was pretty confident it was write something worthwhile. I’m a little stalled on it, mostly due to time, but I won’t give it up. The 80 pages I have still make me laugh, and I easily rate in the best work I’ve done.

-Playing bass for real: I launched myself into playing bass for the Apple Sisters with as much gusto as my four completely unfocused years of playing would let me, and what do you know? It turned out pretty well. I was rarely note perfect in the first few weeks, but I did learn a lot, have fun, and meet some great people. By the second half of our run, the Stems were sounding pretty tight as well.

And so on. I’m approaching a state where my intimidation factor for attaining almost any new skill is zero. I don’t know where my DIY spirit has been hiding my whole life, but it’s finally starting to get me to ignore the fact that I grew up as essentially a talentless child. Now if only I can find a job as a roller-skating comedy bass player. That’s got to exist, right?

I saw a couple of minutes of Dr. Horrible a few months ago, but I finally got around to watching the whole thing on Monday. Surprise! It’s great (as everyone besides me has known for months). It’s great in its execution, polish, and general sense of fun. I watched it on Hulu, which should be the model for displaying long form content online. No signup necessary, a few blissfully short but reasonable ads, and an option for HD and full screen. Nice.

What I’m most curious about though, is what this says about distribution. Joss has said the cost of this little feature is somewhere in the low six figures. Since it’s been the Top 10 of iTunes TV Season download chart for weeks now, I’m assuming he’s made at least some of it back, even at the nominal price point of $5. He’s also just released the soundtrack on iTunes as well (an obvious move, considering how catchy the score is). Now, considering how tight-lipped Apple is about sales figures, I don’t know where the numbers actually fall in terms of revenue for the project. But, I’m imagining he’s pulled in at least $100k on this at this point. That may mean he’s very far away from even breaking even on it, but this wasn’t done to make money.

The genesis of this was, I assume, “fun project to do during the writer’s strike.” And it is fun. Really fun. But you’re telling me this isn’t going to inspire some film kids to do the same thing and see if they can make it work for less money? Because I guarantee there’s at least four groups trying to do the same thing right now. They might totally suck. But they might be pretty fun. And nobody can tell them what to do or not do with their video, because they’re not beholden to anyone.

Now, obviously Joss Whedon has a long history of working in TV and film and is going to know how to make a good video without spending too much or wasting money. Also he has the capital to finance a little project like this. But the fact that he just went for it, and showed that people will always respond to quality work, is a good thing. I’d buy a DVD of Dr. Horrible for the right price. So what’s the next mini-project people would buy? Could come from anywhere.