It has come to my attention that there is such a thing as hot-linking photos on the internet. (It has nothing to do with sausages). Now, I tend to use a lot of pictures in my posts. I feel like it gives them more appeal. This matters very little, since nobody actually reads it, but it makes me feel better about what I post, and I am at heart, a very self-absorbed sort of creature.
Now, I didn't know what hot-linking was, or that I was doing it. (This is a thing wherein instead of saving a photo from the internet and uploading it directly ['ploading' as I like to call it] one uses the web address of said picture. This pulls it directly from its source utilizing the bandwidth of where it is hosted.) Apparently, this is a no-no in blogging. This is a small offense, since nobody reads this blog, and I am not robbing anyone anywhere of any significant amount of bandwidth.
But.
I do want people to read this blog. One day, when my international fame grows to its full potential, as many as twelve people might follow this blog. And I want those twelve people to have confidence that they are reading from a reputable source, one that does not hot-link its silly photographs. So, for anyone from whom I have hot-linked photos, I am truly sorry, and will be working, however haltingly, at fixing all 20 of my previous posts. Please rest assured that this will not be a problem in the future. (Unless you are Amazon. I will hot-link the crap out of anything and everything from Amazon.)
I decided unconsciously to take July off. Rejoice both of you who read this blog!
Well, what really happened is that I busted my buns at the end of June to make a couple deadlines, and found myself creatively dried up. I started reading again, which I haven't done in some time, and watching shows on Netflix. God bless Netflix.
Anyway, I finally got back into my Game of Thrones reading. I am halfway through book four, Feast for Crows, and I had a thought. (no spoilers, I promise.) What is with all the grimdark?
I finished the Anime series Attack on Titan, and began a new one, the Netflix distributed Knights of Sidonia. One thing that all three of these stories share, is a seeming delight in letting us get to know and like a character and then killing that character, often in a brutal way. Where did this come from? I blame Sean Bean.
The man is a walking spoiler.
Now, Martin's Game of Thrones novel is old enough to vote, so I have to imagine that he was in uncharted territory in the world of genre fiction especially back then, but this was totally unthinkable in television as far as I'm aware. Aside from horror, where death and dismemberment are the name of the game, where does this happen? I mean, up until Game of Thrones, the worst I'd heard of was people being shot. Who shot JR? (and much later, who shot Mr. Burns). In either case the character lived. Characters are killed off in daytime soaps, but they often come back. If there's no body, there's no death, and even then sometimes not.
Attack on Titan is about as bad as Game of Thrones. The body count is high, and it's not just unnamed grunts or guys who are just about to retire. That show introduces whole groups of characters that we are taught to love and identify with, and then proceeds to smoosh them like so much raspberry jam. That is almost not a metaphor. Those of you who have seen the show know what I'm talking about.
Be careful who you get attached to.
At times it's like these shows are trolling us.
"Hey, you know that one character you love, and is your favorite character? Nothing, nevermind... muhahahahaaa..." -Scumbag Show
Now, with Game of Thrones, having read well into book four I almost feel like Martin knew he was going to introduce whole countries worth of new characters, and had to kill off a bunch of them just so we had enough space in our cerebral cortexes (corticii?) to remember all the names. But I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. He might just be fucking with us all, laughing behind his monochrome DOS monitor as he plots another mass murder.
The face of evil incarnate.
All this makes me fear for the future of storytelling. Are we as a people going to tolerate our main characters surviving our stories anymore? I am on the cusp of beginning a new fantasy novel, and I don't want to be expected to kill off my main characters. I mean, unless it makes sense. Sometimes a character was born to die. Especially if he's played by Sean Bean. (spoiler alert).
Well, I took some time off. The publication of my first story was a big deal, and I celebrated by slacking off for a bit. Actually, if you account for all the time I've been slacking lately, I was celebrating that particular victory long before I earned it. But now I'm back and writing again. I'm back on the horse, as it were.
In the interval I spent not writing I got back to my nerdy roots. I attended Motor City Comic Con. I started Playing Magic: The Gathering again, a game I've not played since I was fourteen. I even purchased a few comics at the local comics store, Nerdageddon. Now granted, this is a thing I've been wanting to do for myself for awhile. Get back to basics. Embrace the geek in me. But I also did it for my son, an indoor kid in the making.
We drove all over our local area hunting for a comics store. Unfortunately, there seem to have been several that opened and closed, and searching online in my phone didn't always yield the most up-to-date results. When we found the aptly named Nerdageddon, it was the fourth place we had driven to looking for a comics store. It's a great store, but seems like it's fairly new. I hope it has legs and will be around for some time.
I let my son pick out a comic book for himself. He's expressed interest in them, and we have such a hard time getting him to read, that if there is something he actually wants to read, we're all about it. He settled on an issue of his favorite superhero, (and I have no idea how he even knows about him) everyone's favorite merc with a mouth, Deadpool.
Yup. That Deadpool.
Now, my son is ten. I don't want to be a prude and stifle my son's interests, nor do I want him saying and doing inappropriate things (especially in front of his mother). So I leafed through the issue he had, and it seemed all right. I got it for him, and I even got one for myself. I picked up the second issue of a comic title that I read back when I read comics. I got the reboot of Ghost Rider.
Now it's been a number of years since I actually read comics. The Deadpool one was enjoyable. It was violent, sure, but in a fun campy kind of way. Deadpool is the consummate wise-ass, and he's metatextual and breaks the fourth wall. I get it, and it's great. The Ghost Rider reboot however, eh... not so much. Now I need to go to my mom's house and dig out my old collection to be sure, but I don't remember it being so dry, so formulaic.
I didn't intend for this to be a comic review, but I guess that's what it is.
The Ghost Rider that I read was the Spirit of Vengeance. He went after despicable, depraved human beings and dispensed lethal justice. He tangled with a few other Marvel heroes who take exception to homicide no matter what the cause. He's the antihero writ large. I mean come on, he's an actual demon who reaps evil souls. He's a supernatural Punisher. Plus his head is a flaming skull. How cool is that?
The new Ghost Rider seems to have a beef with the local drug cartel. Plus the villain in the issue I read was some sort of pharmaceutical engineer who developed a Jekyll/Hyde drug that turns people into bloodthirsty monsters. He actually called himself Hyde.
I was not engaged in this story right away. It would take a couple more issues to hook me, I think, storywise. What really turned me off though was the artwork. The Ghost Rider I remember was gritty and dark. This new incarnation is almost cartoony in its use of color and exaggerated anatomy. I just... it didn't do anything for me. Take a look at a comparison.
The Ghost Rider I remember and love.
VS
Some kind of... Robot... Skeleton?
He drives a muscle car now. Ok, I guess I can live with that. The motorcycle is a standard of the character, but whatever, we're trying to break new ground here, I get it. Cars are still cool. But what is he? Is he a robot? Is he a ghost? Is he somehow both? I don't... He's totally torching the interior of that car by the way. No way that upholstery is original.
If he is a ghost that looks like a bare human skull, it's a pretty messed up skull. Then again, take a look at the people in this thing.
AHGAD a monster! Oh... wait no, that's just his little brother.
The people look all rubbery and cartoony. It's just... maybe comics have passed me by. Maybe I'm a dinosaur. I don't know. Maybe this is a torch I need to pass on to my son and leave well enough alone. I'll go back to my mom's and get my old books and read them again, and rage all over again when they split the story arc into half a dozen new titles that you have to follow or you have no damn idea what' happening. Yeah. That's what made me quit reading them in the first place.
At my Sister Blog, the aptly named Starpoop and Cheese, my sister blogger (slogger?) wrote a poignant ramble about music, and called upon myself and a few others to put voice to our musical history, or roadmap or whatever. I think that's what she said. I'm not so good with the words.
Be right back...
OK, I went and read it again and it just says "write a music post". So, that's it. It's open to interpretation. I guess I invented that other stuff myself.
Music has been really important to me in that, I just like music all right? Get off my back. I don't feel like I can wax poetic about the way that Ween's "Push th' Little Daisies" got me through some hard times, man. I don't have the emotional vocabulary to explain what it all meant to me. I really just pretty much liked music.
It totally did, though.
I think my musical taste was all about eclecticism. I prided myself in how "weird" my taste in music was. Not that I was into anything really avant-garde, although Mr. Bungle can be pretty strange when they want to be. I just had a very wide variety of tastes that generally excluded whatever was "pop" music.
This started when I was in my formative years in grade school. When my friends were listening to Vanilla Ice and Bell Biv Devoe (or alternatively Poison and Def Leppard) I was listening to the Beatles, The Four Seasons (whatever records [yes, records] my parents had lying around) as well as classical music (the first Compact Disc I ever owned was Beethoven) and some neo-alternative from They Might Be Giants, REM, Talking Heads, and Primus. This last set of music was weird. It was my kind of weird. It had nerdy, complex, or downright strange lyrics, (Les Claypool, I'm lookin' at you) and almost as strange music. I guess I didn't want to be pigeonholed into being the guy who listens to [insert genre tag] music, so I gravitated toward music that was impossible to define by its genre.
No, it's supposed to sound like that... really.
And I wore t-shirts to proclaim it. I wanted to be undefinable, but be as loud as I could about it. In an ironic twist, all the music I loved got lumped together in what was now called "Alternative" and I myself got lumped in with the "Alternative" crowd. I remember very clearly someone asking me "So what do you listen to". Not wanting to say something categorical like "Rap" or "Metal" I described what bands I listened to, and she said "Oh, you're one of those alternative kids."
I guess so?
In my attempt to be different and follow my own path, I fell into another. At the time, that was when alternative was good. Kurt Cobain was "still alive" (Yes, I know that's a Pearl Jam Song, haha. I make joke.) and "alternative" was in its early ascent to the mainstream. This is when I made connections to bands that I still love to this day; bands like Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains, Dinosaur Jr, to name a few. The one that I love most of all though is Smashing Pumpkins. I remember where I was. I remember where I bought the album. I remember sitting on the floor in front of the CD player at my friend Mike's house the first time I listened to Siamese Dream and it totally blew me away.
Best track 1 ever.
This is my desert island album. It is (almost) flawless start to finish. Anyway, from there Alternative as a whole fell into complacency and eventually irrelevance. Too many imitators, too many Eddie V wannabes (and I don't mean VanHalen). By the time Nu Metal came on the scene, I was looking for something new. what I found was Ska.
I'm referring to what is known as 3rd wave ska. I won't get into it, but basically this isn't the jazz ska, it's the punk-infused version. The curious can read more here. These bands were Reel Big Fish, The Suicide Machines, and the big one, Operation Ivy. If there is a desert island where you get to pick more than one CD, book, movie, what have you, Operation Ivy's Energy will sit right beside Siamese Dream. This album... my speakers never seem to be able to go loud enough for it.
Hard to pick one when they're all so good.
This was the last time I really let myself be defined by a genre. I went through a phase where I thought I was a punk. I wasn't punk. I went to a State College in Michigan. I've never even set foot on a skateboard or smoked a cigarette. It worked out fine because ska died in the late 90's about as quick as it hit mainstream. That's fine, because a lot of it was silly and superficial.
There isn't enough room in this blog for the rest of it all. I've since become a ravenous music explorer. I love falling down the wormhole of niche subgenres. To pick through all the bands that formed the Black Metal movement in Norway. To find the nuances that made shoegaze music what it was, and how it influenced other bands. To give some bands a spin that people take for granted like Rush or Kansas. To listen to the kings and queens of Motown, your Stevie Wonders, and your Diana Rosses...
My latest new album purchases? Journey - Evolution (Don't judge me. Listen to Steve Perry and tell me the man isn't incredible) Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I might See because I neglected them in the 90's and wow, this is dreamy floaty shoegaze and it's great. Almost better than Jesus and Mary Chain. And lastly, Chvrches, because one has to stay relevant. I'm kidding, I only get music because I genuinely enjoy listening to it, and Chvrches is some solid pop. Does it speak to me on some kind of emotional or spiritual level? Frankly, I don't really know, and I don't really care. I only know that it makes me feel. I learned some time ago that you can't let what you listen to define you. I learned that earnestness is cooler than being part of a scene. But I don't really know what cool is anyway, so nevermind.
I leave you with my favorite song from Ke$ha, because I think she gets a bad rap and I actually like her music. It' fun and honest and sweary and dancey and awesome.
Maybe more about music in another entry later, but this is a decent overview.
Oh, one more thing. I don't like Jazz or County. I neither understand nor appreciate the aesthetic of either, even though I recognize that musicians are all talented no mater what they play. Just... play it somewhere else.
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