dr. who

[Jon Jarrett]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

> On 17 Mar 2005, at 22:57, Nick Medford wrote:
> > I do remember watching about 10 minutes of Sylvester
> > McCoy as the Dr, and feeling outraged at this feeble travesty of my
> > cherished childhood memories- don't tell me the Whovians dig Sylvester
> > too, it can't be the case, surely??
>
> Don't think I qualify as a Whovian, but I thought the likes of McCoy
> and Colin Baker were actually reasonable interpretations of the
> character (IMO, it would be boring if the Doctor were always the same),
> but were often very ill-served by the scripts from their periods.

        I quite liked McCoy at the age I was when that came out, I thought
he was odd enough to be the Doctor all right, but I rarely if ever watched
it (though obviously like any sane person I loved the theme tune). I had
since then gathered that the main reasons Who buffs favoured that
incarnation was because that was the first time the Doctor had an even
faintly attractive sidekick. I'm not sure I ever agreed with that but I'm
sure I've seen it expressed. <shrugs> Yours,
                                             Jon (who is writing up)

ObCD: Red Giant - _Ultramagnetic Glowing Sound_ (I hope I've mentioned how
good this album is already? It's really good. Hey! I'll post you a
mini-review I wrote when I first got it:

Subject: Red Giant - _Ultramagnetic Glowing Sound_

        `New one and I am quite impressed. In my imagination the creative
process here is something like this: some Axelrod-like figure descends
upon Fu Manchu c. 1996, smokes a lot with them and says, "boys, I like
your sound a whole lot, but you could be doing so much more". So they get
some band like Keelhaul or someone *slightly* calmer to send them some
spare songs, and spend a while putting them together and so on but it
doesn't come out right no matter how hard they try, and the Axelrod type
departs in high dudgeon to find a more ambitious and biddable band. In
Cleveland Ohio he finds Red Giant, anxious as hell to get out as is
everyone there with any ties to the counter-culture, and they smoke a lot
more, and then he plays the demos at them and says, "how would you guys do
this?" and they say "well, the transitions are all a bit choppy and messy,
we'd basically drench all the changes in echoplexed delay and feedback,
generally do things slower half the time and faster the other half,
and, oh, yeah, we'd channel the spirit of one of Comets on Fire's
guitarists in case it started to sound too much like we were trying to
play doom." "Anything else?" says the Axelrod guy, and they say, "well,
yeah, we'd also like to change all the lyrics about vans and girls so that
they're about gods, stars and spaceships" at which point the mentor goes
and books the studio time and the results are about to go round on my CD
player again. I like this.'

--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)