Hostrauser's Incredibly Unpopular DCI Quarterfinals Opinions

[theCHEZman]

Great post.

I do have to agree with you on SCV... Marvelously done, but that's all I get out of it.

I really like SCV but I think it is no where near the depth of the 3 above them and the judging community is being very generous with some of the numbers they are awarding. If BD, CC or Cadets did a 1990's show like this with props, they would get obliterated in GE for doing stuff that has been done many times already.

[Northern Thunder]

I just went back and looked at his original post. He has 26 green "+" signs, and a GOLD STAR in the right top of his post which proclaims him to be "popular!"

I don't think I've seen many (if any) of those gold stars here previously. Do those pop up if you get 25 green pluses or more?

[hostrauser]

I love the OP! I love the way you turn a phrase. I just wish you wrote it based on watching a live performance.

Me too! The journey from the west coast can get financially onerous though, even for a DINK household like ours. BUT! Part of our fiscal constraints involve saving up for a move to the midwest (Wisconsin) in 2014 or 2015. Once Indy is withing driving distance, I will be there in person just about every year. (And thank you!)

I don't think I've seen many (if any) of those gold stars here previously. Do those pop up if you get 25 green pluses or more?

I've seen one or two of them before, but they only pop up a few times a year, it seems. I'm not sure what the threshold is, but +20 or +25 sounds right. I know this is the first time I've gotten a gold star on one of my posts. I feel honored.

[hostrauser]

Great insights for sure. i would have loved to here what he thinks of the Bluecoats, now especially with a tie with Phantom going into finals. Was there last night and enjoyed all the energy areound the corps and the audience.

They have one of the best design staffs in DCI, IMO, who create a Top 3 or Top 5 caliber show every season. They perform very well, but not quite consistently enough at that high level. 2010 should not be an aberration: there is no reason the Bluecoats can't become a fixture in the Top 5 and compete for medals semi-regularly if they can just find that one extra gear every season like they did in 2010.

As for their 2013 show, I didn't really care for the concept or the source material, but this is a comment on pure personal preference as opposed to noticing glaring design flaws.

[ScoutMello]

and you ignored what I said, I said in the post the the difficulty in BDs show is the volume of things the performers must do, its the 50 hard things vs 100 easy things argument.

I think there would be contention for the 'easy things' assessment. They're doing DIFFERENT things. Fundamentally different, where traditional drill isn't the primary focus. But that doesn't mean what they do is easier. There are other kinds of difficulty besides making the performers run further/faster than everyone else.

Personally, I think the fact that so many think what they're doing is easy is a testament to their level of performance.

[fsubone]

Me too! The journey from the west coast can get financially onerous though, even for a DINK household like ours. BUT! Part of our fiscal constraints involve saving up for a move to the midwest (Wisconsin) in 2014 or 2015. Once Indy is withing driving distance, I will be there in person just about every year. (And thank you!)

Only until they move Finals away from Indy in 2018. Maybe they'll send it back to Madison for a year.

[Plan9]

I'm not really sure you even understand what demanding is. You've posted for a long time about how easy you believe BD's drill to be. I think you are only thinking in terms of tempo or step size (something Devils have had in abundance, particularly the last few years). Whiplash drill isn't what it's all about. Heck, a lot of high-speed whiplash drill is fairly easy, or at best only physically demanding.

The Blue Devils (and Crown to some extent, with different responsibilities) are putting excruciating physical AND mental demands on the performers. They also do it in terms of simultaneous responsibilities, something you rarely see from whiplash drill corps. The folks that took pot-shots at the chairs, mirrors, and poles really have no idea how zero-tolerance that visual style is, not to mention exhausting physically and mentally. Consider as well the challenge of marching closed geometric forms with *multiple* points of exposure and it gets even harder.

I wish Devils would have a fantasy baseball type camp where we could send the folks that just don't understand...they'd learn really quick how truly difficult that type of visual program truly is.

Excellent post.

Another double standard that exists on DCP is the lack of any comment about Bluecoats use of the stands this year. BTW....I love them and they are used masterfully. But back in 2009, DCP had posters saying "how can BD get scored so high, when all they do is sit?" and on and on about how easy it is to just sit and not have to march.....BUT this year.....not a single comment about Bluecoats sitting.....zippo! And I'm glad about that.......but DCP should apply the same judgement to BD that they do with every corps.

[fsubone]

Excellent post.

Another double standard that exists on DCP is the lack of any comment about Bluecoats use of the stands this year. BTW....I love them and they are used masterfully. But back in 2009, DCP had posters saying "how can BD get scored so high, when all they do is sit?" and on and on about how easy it is to just sit and not have to march.....BUT this year.....not a single comment about Bluecoats sitting.....zippo! And I'm glad about that.......but DCP should apply the same judgement to BD that they do with every corps.

Probably because it's not innovative this year. When BD did it, people hadn't seen it on that kind of level before. Now with Bluecoats, it's not as radical. People have trouble accepting change, or new things in show design. Once it's been a few years, and other groups try something, it's not quite as shocking. Downside to innovation.

[N.E. Brigand]

Another double standard that exists on DCP is the lack of any comment about Bluecoats use of the stands this year. BTW, I love them and they are used masterfully. But back in 2009, DCP had posters saying, "How can BD get scored so high, when all they do is sit?", and on and on about how easy it is to just sit and not have to march. BUT this year, not a single comment about Bluecoats sitting--zippo!

Weird. I thought I had seen a comment or two about this over the summer, but I can't find them now. It certainly occurred to me that Bluecoats were doing what some people criticized Blue Devils for in 2009, but BD's chairs never bothered me. I will agree with you that people often criticize BD for elements, liked amplified brass solos, for which other corps are given a pass (that would be a case where I dislike it regardless of who's doing it), but not always: there's a whole poll right now about whether Crown's vocals are good or not, just as the prerecorded vocals in BD's show last year were attacked (here Crown comes out on top for me, because in drum corps, live is always preferable to sampled: and yes, I know that some of Crown's vocals are pre-recorded).

I think what's really happening is that, apart from those people who just don't want BD to win--and there are some people like that, though not as many as you sometimes appear to believe--BD's shows are less interesting for many people, but those people have a hard time explaining "dull", so they pick on other aspects. For me, BD's show is somewhat like a novel without a plot, or an experimental film. I don't mean an art film of the type that gets nominated for an Oscar but sells no tickets: No Country for Old Men as opposed to Transformers, to use 2007 as a sample year. I mean a film of the type that never even gets on the Academy's radar, and only shows at the festivals or cinematheques for specialized connoisseurs, often foreign, but no more popular in its own country than here: Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn for instance, which Wikipedia describes as follows:

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is set in the approximately ninety minutes of the last feature at an old Taipei cinema that is closing down, showing King Hu's 1967 sword-fighting classic Dragon Inn. Only a few people are present in the cinema, and a variety of subplots are developed around them. Throughout the film, the ticket woman tries to find the projectionist, searching for him in order to present him with a steamed bun. She wears an iron brace on her leg. She walks around the theater throughout the film, struggling up and down stairs. A young Japanese tourist wanders around the cinema in search of a homosexual encounter. An older man tells him that the cinema is haunted. An old man, who was one of the actors who appeared in the original Dragon Inn, watches the film with tears in his eyes. Outside the theater, he encounters an older man who had been watching the film with his grandson; this man also starred in the original film.

The film is shot with almost no camera movement, most shots lasting well over thirty seconds. There are only about a dozen of lines of dialogue.

All the reviews I've read of that movie are positive and some are glowing (Time Out New York: "A must-see art house masterpiece!"), but naturally it did very little business! A further reason why might be clear from this review, which argues for the value of that movie, but nonetheless allows that:

"Tsai's film is not free of longueurs, but like much modern work in almost every field, these stretches are deliberate assaults on conventional expectation. Certainly there can come a point where the longueur in such a work simply smothers the artist's intent..."

Would it be fair to say that Blue Devils make "deliberate assaults on conventional expectation"? And if so, is it any surprise that the assaulted parties fight back?

(Edited to fix a couple typos.)

Edited August 10, 2013 by N.E. Brigand

[skywhopper]

Another double standard that exists on DCP is the lack of any comment about Bluecoats use of the stands this year. BTW....I love them and they are used masterfully. But back in 2009, DCP had posters saying "how can BD get scored so high, when all they do is sit?" and on and on about how easy it is to just sit and not have to march.....BUT this year.....not a single comment about Bluecoats sitting.....zippo! And I'm glad about that.......but DCP should apply the same judgement to BD that they do with every corps.

Possibly this is because the Bluecoats *aren't* getting scored high? If Bluecoats were leading by as much as BD was in 2009, you can be sure people would be #####ing about them sitting on the stands.

Edited August 10, 2013 by skywhopper