Friday Misc

The usual this and that from another week in paradise -- if you're definition of paradise is a place where the temp stays below zero for days on end.

Anyway, new MinnPost story on the Theatre Unbound 24 Hour Play Project is online.

As are a couple of pieces at Lakeshore Weekly News.

Lost is back. The debut was dynamite -- full of the intrigue and real drama that has always marked the best episodes of the series. It followed through with a number of the major cliff hangers from last season, found a new way to divide the survivors, had some excellent scares and reminded me why Hurley has always been a favorite character. At the beginning, when he shouted "I'm one of the Oceanic Six" I knew we had a major mystery for the rest of the season -- who are the other three (Jack, Kate and Hurley are all in the "flash-forward" world) survivors, and what happened to the rest? For the first time, I'm cursing the writer's strike (well, more episodes of Pushing Up Daisies would have been nice) and hope it ends in time to get the rest of season 4.

For readers in Britain -- or Americans with, um, access -- the sequel to the terrific Life on Mars starts next week. Ashes to Ashes (another David Bowie song) moves the action to 1980, has a number of the old Manchester cops, no Sam Tyler, but a new detective who "time travels" (i.e., gets a bump on the head and wakes up in the past) from modern day. The science-fiction hook was always secondary to the characters and the loving pastiche of old-school cop dramas. Hopefully that'll keep with an era that shouldn't seem so much like living on another world.

And a bit (OK, more than a bit) of a musical obscurity this week:

Age The Scar of Lead

Japanese crusty four-piece that I really know nothing about except that they were part of the Amebix Japan comp a couple of years back and have a couple of eps floating around. This seven track mini-lp has tons of charms, from the raging, nearly out-of-control fury of the playing to the oddly translated English lyrics that make more sense the longer you read them ("The night full of wicked hearts attack on" is a prime example). Age even tackle Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry, which marks the first time something related to that band has been cool since 1983. I picked it up at my local punk rock shop, Extreme Noise. If you're interested, you will have to hunt -- the Internet didn't offer any band or label sites, but there were a smattering of places that sold the lp.