Tacos and Beer

I’m posting this a few days late. But Friday was March 15, AKA the Ides of March, AKA the anniversary of the first DVD release of INTERPLANETARY in 2011. I always forget that movie came out in 2011 because it should have come out much earlier. But that movie was literally years in the making — it was a tough movie to finish! I am always happy to see that my old blog about the making of INTERPLANETARY... I’m posting this a few days late. But Friday was March 15, AKA the Ides of March, AKA the anniversary of the first DVD release of Interplanetary in 2011. I always forget that movie came out in 2011 because it should have come out much earlier. But that movie was literally years in the making — it was a tough movie to finish! I am always happy to see that my old blog about the making of Interplanetary is still available on Blogger. And I am happy that people can still watch the movie — it’s currently streaming on Tubi .

I’ve been playing music with Eric McGinty for two decades now. Our band the Exhibit(s) has recorded a couple of albums, and Eric worked on the music for several of my film projects. (You can listen to our albums on Bandcamp here and here , and you can check out Hide and Creep if you’d like to hear some of Eric’s film scoring work.) Eric and I have been talking about recording another (very overdue) Exhibit(s) album, plus maybe a side project album, so I’ve been thinking about recording drums. The obvious way to record drums is to go to a professional studio and pay a professional engineer to record the drums. But that kind of stresses me out. Drums are generally the foundation of rock music recordings, which means the drums need to be recorded first. And given that I am not the most consistent drummer, I worry about wasting everybody’s time and money while they wait for me to get my parts recorded correctly. I can’t record drums at home because I live in an apartment, and I ...

Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt makes the case for heroic guitar solos . He also nerds out about Van Halen and Queen and Supertramp. Defining what exactly is a “hair metal” band is tricky on its own. Rolling Stone gave it a shot and then put together a list of the 50 greatest hair metal albums of all time . Not the list I would have made (Faster Pussycat’s second album should be on this list!), but some good picks in here all the same. A Superwoman that almost was . Sometimes comic books influence movies, and then those movies influence comic books .

The Venture Bros. is probably my favorite TV show ever. It’s like the one show I wish I could have worked on. It got canceled a while back, but the Venture Bros. movie is high on my list of best films of 2023. If you’re a Venture fan, here’s a good Swimpedia interview with the creators of show . I mean, it’s a good interview regardless, but it won’t make a lot of sense to folks who aren’t well-steeped in Venture lore. And speaking of great cartoons, here’s the lost-until-recently six-minute Boondocks pilot .