What Is An Arcadium, Anyway?

Over the weekend I had a chance to listen to Red Hot Chili Pepper's Stadium Arcadium from start to finish for the first time in a while--and it's a double-album, twenty-eight tracks altogether. And while the RHCP sound is certainly dominated by Flea's bass insanity and Anthony's raps about sex and geography, this time around I was most impressed by John Fruciante's guitar work. Particularly, listen to Charlie and Turn it Again, in which the guitar layering is most evident. Both songs devolve into guitar breaks for their endings and feature some fantastic melodic hooks.

Of course, the whole album is pretty kick-ass. I think you could have picked four songs at random and called them singles (I love the opener, Dani California, but I couldn't say that it's any stronger than Death of a Martian, which closes the album). I'm also amused by the random trumpet lines that show up in songs (e.g., Turn it Again or Hump De Bump) because Flea, in addition to being one of the most prominent bassists in the world, is an equally skilled trumpet player.

Anyway, nothing profound to say. Just that this record makes me happy.

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Social Media's Accidental Usefulness

So Evan and I have had an ongoing discussion about what we can do with Google Wave, now that we both have it. The suggested uses are document collaboration and event planning. This spawned a thread of the discussion that most of us use Facebook for event planning, even though that's not why we joined it. We all joined because everyone was doing it and it was a way to keep in touch with friends and share photos (another purported use for Wave) and play stupid games with each other. And then it turns out to be a fairly useful event planning tool (and a much more user-friendly one than MySpace).

Or look at Twitter, people get on because it's trendy, you get to talk about yourself, it works with your cell phone, etc, etc, etc. All of this is pretty vapid and meaningless, but Twitter has become a way to get news quickly. Remember when Captain Sully landed a plane in the Hudson river all those months ago? Twitter broke the story well before any of the news outlets.

So you have things like Facebook and Twitter which are, on their... ahem... faces, pretty shallow, but turn out to be real tools with real uses in the real world. But if you had started a service like Twitter with the idea of getting news to people quickly, nobody would care. If you started Facebook as the ultimate event-planning app, no one would go for it, and apps like these are only useful if you have lots and lots of people using them.

So if we want to get Wave off the ground, we need to come up with some piddly, insignificant shit that it can do that will attract users. Then you can actually start using it as a tool.

Any ideas?

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Steam Powered Fail

Argh, my install of Steam got corrupted and couldn't be repaired, meaning I've lost most of the games I have installed on this computer.

Of course, the beauty of Steam is that I could just uninstall the client and then reinstall it and I've got everything back. But that means I have to reinstall, well, every game I feel like playing that was purchased through Steam.

Which takes a while.

Ugh. No L4D for Kurt tonight.

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Bad Beatles Renaissance: The White Album

Purists will point out that the actual title of this album is The Beatles, but since it has gained such renown as The White Album, and since that's what the band refers to it as, henceforth so shall it be called. Without that title, we would never have had Metallica's The Black Album, Jay-Z's The Black Album, the Simpson's collection The Yellow Album, or half of Weezer's catalog (The Blue Album, The Green Album, and The Red Album).

This is one of those albums that it's worth picking up the remasters for. You can pick out whole instruments that weren't apparent in previous releases. The clarity and definition in the new masters is incredible, and the complex arrangements in these songs really benefits from it.

So this album was supposed to be the follow-up to the legacy-defining Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the time since SPLHCB, the group had lost their manager, made a truly awful movie (Magical Mystery Tour) that had spawned a memorable soundtrack, and gone to India to find spirituality. While in India, they wrote a whole bunch of music on acoustic guitar and came back pissed off and disillusioned, and began writing and recording. The new technology allowed them to track individually, and they put together a whole lot of music, so much so that The White Album feels almost more like a collection of four individual efforts than an actual double-album. Indeed, the only song that all four played on at the same time was Happiness is a Warm Gun.

The songs range from the simply-crafted I Will and Julia to the cacophonous Helter Skelter, to the jaunty complexity of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da to the subtle political wiles of Back in the U.S.S.R. to the we're-not-sure-why-they-wrote-this-song-at-all-ness of Birthday and Goodnight.

Also included on the album is Don't Pass Me By, Ringo's first creative contribution. His first of two. Ringo was a fabulous drummer, but I'm glad he didn't write too many songs. Our "What the fuck, George?" moment comes from the song Piggies, which is played on a harpsichord and would go on to be a big influence on Charles Manson. Wild Honey Pie gets the "Nice effort, there, Paul", narrowly edging out Can You Take Me Back because it gets its own track (Can You Take Me Back is appended to the end of Cry Baby Cry, almost as an afterthought).

As for "John being a dick," there are too many moments to choose from. There's Glass Onion in which he deliberately feeds disinformation to fans vis-a-vis Paul, the walrus, et al. (Also, I have a particular dislike of artists referencing previous songs in new songs.) Or there's Sexy Sadie, which was a none-too-complimentary song about the Maharishi. Or we could talk about how he managed to get Yoko a lead vocal part (if only for a single, incomprehensible line) on The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.

And then there's Revolution 9, the only must-skip song in the Beatles' catalog, a song which Paul and producer George Martin tried very hard to block, because it's 8 and a half minutes of noise. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting noise, but it's still noise. Also, I may have mentioned that it goes on for over eight minutes!!!! I have a cousin who swears its exactly what an acid trip sounds like, so I guess that's kind of cool, but on the whole it is an artistic experiment that fails miserably, but that John put on the album anyway.

The songwriting is generally pretty solid, but the recordings are decidedly unpolished--and this may or may not have been intentional. The album is riddled with lo-fi moments from botched takes (a la Revolution 1) to studio chatter (a la... well, most of them actually) to abrupt and noticeable edits. A particularly vexing incident of the latter happens at the end of Yer Blues in which the beginning of a different take was spliced on as an outro--John's vocal was muted but can still be heard bleeding into other microphones.

Still, the album is pretty remarkable, especially in songs like Mother Nature's Son where a simple guitar ballad is beautifully supported by George Martin's score. Despite how constructed it was, it captured the sort of live-and-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vibe that I think Paul was going for with the Get Back sessions (that would eventually become Let It Be). The White Album contains several of the group's most enduring compositions, and it shows a foursome that is experimenting wildly but is still, at heart, a rock and roll band.

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There's Also A "Leggy-Blonde"

I love the fact that I can walk into the office and say "Dude, Leather-Boots is Kitten-Liver" and at least one or two people will know what I'm talking about.

This comes from working in an office where we only know people in the building by their physical appearance or vehicles (for those of you playing at home, "Kitten-Liver" comes from a license plate: KTNLVR).

So there's corporate culture for you. And, for the record, Leather-Boots did, in fact, turn out to be the same person as Kitten-Liver.

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Some "Random" Entries Are More Random Than Others

Dude, I totally forgot to celebrate Guy Fawkes day. I was gonna, like, blow up some shit... and stuff.

I'll be in Kansas City for the weekend, my only computer an underpowered EEEPC with an uncomfortably small keyboard. So, if I don't respond to comments, that's why.

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Don't Tell Me "Rise of Cobra" Isn't Sexual

So Abby and I rented G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra to see if it is as truly awful as everyone says. And the verdict is: yes, it's pretty bad. Thankfully, it's not unwatchably bad. I didn't want to gouge my eyes out or just turn it off and walk away (like we did with Shrink earlier this week). But it hinges on some pretty stupid ideas.

And I blame the director for all of it. The film is a study in poor execution. It hits all the right beats, but it stumbles over itself. There's a grace and poise to some of the action sequences, but there's a whole lot of senseless chaos as well. There are huge special effects sequences, but they all look really, really fake. Every single plot twist was telegraphed; every plot point was overstated. Really, for me the unintentional laughs started with the fancy Hasbro production logo.

Main themes of the script include: becoming evil means dying your hair black and donning glasses. Or burning your face and wearing some kind of mask. What else... oh yeah, science is evil. And intelligent women don't believe in emotions. It's basically an affront against nerds, and who do they think is going to see this movie if not nerds? On a storytelling level, there were no fewer than seven unnecessary flashback sequences (eight if you count Baroness's frequent flitting remembrances of a better time with Duke). Cobra Commander controls the world by brainwashing all of his minions with nano-technology (seriously...). He's the only real bad-guy in the movie. Well, Destro started out bad, then he became a pawn... and Storm Shadow was bad, because his rivalry with Snake Eyes needed to be a plot point for some reason... something to do with honor and swordplay and being Japanese. Seriously...

The film was horribly miscast--Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a fine actor, but he's not menacing. His character was a blatant rip-off of Darth Vader. Channing Tatum looked the part for Duke, but he didn't do anything outside the typical grizzled soldier routine. Baroness was okay--Sienna Miller is not exactly a powerhouse of acting prowess, but she filled her bustier... erm, role well enough (she did quite well when you look at the script--during a terrorist attack she stopped to tell a woman "nice shoes"... seriously...). But Marlon Wayans as Ripcord? Really? You made an action movie and your first instinct was "we need us a Wayans"? That was bad, but not egregious. Brendan Fraser as Sgt. Slaughter was egregious. Jonathan Price (British accent and all) as the President of the United States was egregious.

The design was over-the-top to the point of laughable, like the rest of it. And without any sense of coordination--at the end we have Cobra Commander and Destro and from a distance they looked exactly alike.

I'm sad at the potential--there were lots of little moments that I thought could have had some weight if done correctly. Such as the Baroness's redemption at the end: she's in prison (oh yeah, spoiler alert) and says she'll never get out because of all the horrible things she's done, but Duke says it wasn't really her, they kiss, yay! It could have been a little darker, a little heavier if she had said something instead that all the horrible things she had done really were her--she might not have started out as the kind of person who would kill people, but she is now, and she's not going back. You know, character arc, that kind of thing.

But what should I really expect from a Hasbro production?

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Potential alternate title: "Hasbro, Will Travel"