A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2012 Signum Classics Records On September 24, 2012, Britain's Signum Records released The Best of The King's Singers, a two-disc, 40-track compilation of a capella  performances by the current iteration of The King's Singers (Patrick Dunachie, Timothy Wayne-Wright, Julian Gregory, Christopher Bruerton, Christopher Gabbitas, and Jonathan Howard). As I wrote yesterday on my review of Gold, The King's Singers is a sextet of singers (two countertenors, one tenor, two baritones, and one bass) that performs choral compositions from various historical eras and genres without accompaniment. First formed by six choral students (five from King's College in Cambridge and one from Christ Church, Oxford) in 1968, several iterations of The King's Singers have performed in Great Britain, Europe, the U.S., and other countries throughout the world over the past half-century. Additionally, their recordings and concerts on DVD and other home media formats sell well, es...

Many years ago, my hometown of Miami (Florida) had a classical music station, WTMI-FM. Its location on the FM dial was 93.1, and although it did not have as many listeners as stations that played other formats (rock, adult contemporary pop, urban hip hop, oldies, country, or Spanish-language music), it had a loyal base of listeners. I ought to know; from the first time that I tuned in in the early 1980s to December 31, 2001, the sad day when it signed off the air to become Party 93.1, I was a member of that loyal base of listeners. In that two-decade span when I listened to South Florida's "classy and jazzy" radio station, I heard a wide array of compositions, composers, orchestras, and even some awesome solo acts that encompassed many musical genres. Most of the music I listened to was symphonic/instrumental, but every so often I'd come across singers such as Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli, Audra McDonald, and, of course, Luciano Pavarotti (either as a solois...

(C) 2001, 2006 Sony Pictures/Sony Home Entertainment On February 10, 1999, the Atlantic Monthly Press published Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War by Mark Bowden, a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer .  Based on a 29-part series of articles Bowden wrote for the newspaper in the late '90s, Black Hawk Down was the first in-depth book about Operation Gothic Serpent, the mission that pitted 150 Army Rangers, Delta Force operators, and helicopter crews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) against thousands of Somali gunmen in the infamous First Battle of Mogadishu (October 3-4, 1993), which the Somalis refer to as Maaliniti Rangers (Day of the Rangers). The original hardcover edition. (C) 1999 Atlantic Monthly Press Bowden's book earned critical acclaim for its vivid description of the most ferocious fighting American forces were involved with since Vietnam; 19 U.S. servicemen were killed, 73 were wounded, and Michael Durant, a helic...

Screenshot from F-15 Strike Eagle III, Panama Campaign.  All images are (C) 1992 MicroProse Software As much as I love computers, I sometimes get frustrated with how quickly they become obsolescent. I read somewhere that advances in computing technology are so fast that the PCs we buy now (say, October of 2018) will already be "old tech" by January of 2020, if not sooner.  In the 1990s I went through at least five computers in less than eight years for one reason or another (new operating systems came out; new chips replaced older, slower ones, better graphics cards/soundcards came out; CD-ROM replaced floppies; the list is freakin' endless).  And because I was getting a new PC every year or so (mostly inexpensive ones built from storebought parts), I found that some of the  DOS-based games I played in my spare time didn't work on newer machines.  I miss quite a few of those old DOS-based games, especially those that were never got new-and-impro...

Cover art for the 1990 first edition by Chip Kidd. (C) 1990 Alfred A. Knopf Nowadays, the title  Jurassic Park  conjures up images from a series of films which began with Steven Spielberg's Apatosaurus-sized blockbuster and became an ongoing franchise. As of this writing, Universal Pictures has released  five  films in the series, including  The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World,  and this year’s  Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom  This, of course, is to be expected and is not exactly a new concept in Hollywood; Jaws, which was Spielberg's first real blockbuster (and is in fact the grandfather of the modern "monster hit movie") also started out as a decent horror film about a predator with sharp teeth that, um, snacked on people...and should have, like its 1993 cinematic heir, should have been left as a stand-alone film. What some people tend to forget is that both these franchise-starting Spielberg f...

Do you remember MicroProse Software’s F-15 Strike Eagle series of video games/simulators?  I sure do; the three editions of the classic game were among my favorite pastimes when I was younger and had several PCs that ran on the MS-DOS operating system. If you are old enough to have played DOS-based computer games in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, you probably played one of the now-gone (but not forgotten) Maryland software company co-founded by retired Air Force colonel John Wilbur (Wild Bill) Stealey, Sr. and legendary game designer Sid Meier, who is best known for creating Sid Meier’s Civilization and Sid Meier’s Pirates! F-15 Strike Eagle was the first sim in the series. (C) 1985 MicroProse Software The F-15 Strike Eagle franchise was launched in 1985 by its eponymous Meier-designed flight simulator for the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. A first-person perspective-based game dominated by a representation of a Heads-Up Display (HUD), F-15 Strike Eagle was al...