Journal: News & Comment

Three things on entertainment

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• The Economist provides the best overview of the current state of the recorded music industry I've read in a long time.
  
  
• The Incredibles, which my kids and I saw last night, shows once again that Pixar seems incapable of making a bad movie. Directed by Brad Bird, who also made the excellent Iron Giant for Warner Bros. five years ago, this is a computer-animated movie for slightly older kids. My four-year-old wanted to go home, then fell asleep (some bits drag if you're not that interested in dialogue, and others are a little scary)—even though it was her idea to go—while my six-year-old and I both liked it a lot.
  
  If you're the type who doesn't want to expose your kids to violence and death (though that's never stopped kids from finding out), this isn't your Pixar film. There's nothing graphic, but somehow having actual "people" (often henchmen) blown up or sucked into jet engines is different than having bugs (A Bug's Life) or fish (Finding Nemo) eaten by birds or barracudas. Yet because of that, the action is more vital and exciting than anything in any recent James Bond or Vin Diesel movie.
  
  
• The small indie band Ghosts of Pasha recently had a lame Sunday night show in New York turned into a fabulous, packed mosh-fest by a group of performance artists. It's a pretty cool stunt, and it doesn't hurt that their music is pretty decent. I know the feeling they had—in 1995, I was in a band called The Flu, and we took out a loan to travel to the Melbourne Music Festival in Australia. We started out with hardly any audience at empty clubs, and three weeks later had groups of people driving two hours to watch us play in Bendigo, far inland from the city. Then we got back to Vancouver and did a brief tour of Alberta, where nobody knew who we were. A few months later, the band broke up. But having fans sure was fun.

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