I was delighted to appear on Pop Culture Happy Hour again last week. (Listen here, you.) The show's A-topic was movie action heroes, inspired by the publication of Arnold Schwarzengger's memoir Total Recall (which I'd only half-read prior to taping, on account of its 624-page girth and the fact I'm reading it in tandem with Salman Rushdie's equally substantial memoir Joseph Anton) and, I thought, Taken 2(which I haven't seen, and won't until it turns up on Encore Action at 11:30 p.m. on a Tuesday eight months from now).
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While you were watching President Obama Uncle Fluffy his way through
the first presidential debate Wednesday night, I was watching the Soft
Pack play the Black Cat.
That’s right: I went to see a band the youngest
member of which is probably a decade younger than me. Usually I’m on
the venerable old treasure beat, more or less voluntarily.
I reviewed their show for today’s Washington Post.
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I finally saw Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark this
weekend, but that was just to kill an evening in New York City in
advance of the event that had precipitated the trip from DC: The very
first East Coast performance of The Thrilling Adventure Hour.
I'm glad you asked! The Thrilling Adventure Hour is a podcast that my pal Glen Weldon
turned me onto early last year. It lost no time shooting to the top of
my list of favorite things. Recorded at the Los Angeles nightclub Largo
at the Coronet the first weekend of each month, TAHis a
collection of hilarious serial narratives that affectionately parody the
pre-television radio dramas I discovered when I lived in LA and was
spending too many of my precious few hours of life in my car.
The best of them are the two that bookend the monthly live show.
Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars is basically The Lone Ranger set on the Red Planet, only with more musical numbers, like its marvelous theme song. It stars Marc Evan Jackson as Sparks and Mark Gagliardi
as "his faithful Martian companion, Croach the Tracker," whose fidelity
to strict codes of Martian honor often has him "under onus" to the
Earth-man he works for, who means well but is sometimes a bit of a jerk.
There's
a rotating feature in the middle, plus some funny fake commercials for
fake sponsors Workjuice Coffee and Patriot Brand Cigarettes.
The closing feature is Beyond Belief, starring Paget Brewster and Paul F. Tompkins
as Sadie and Frank Doyle, a high-functioning, alcoholic 1930s society
couple who help people with their supernatural troubles. Especially if
those supernatural troubles stand in the way of the Doyles' next drink.
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