Coming Soon: Part 2, American Communism

So Guns N' Roses finally got around to releasing Chinese Democracy.  What's it been?  17 years in the making?  Millions of dollars to make (I heard $13 mil ca. 2005).  Is it any good?  Will it sell?  Does anyone care?

In order: Probably not, maybe, yes-but-not-for-long.

Let's run this down:  First, is it good?

Well, so far I'm not impressed with what I've heard--one listening apiece of two songs, neither of which inspired any confidence in me at the time.  Which is not to say that the rest of the album isn't good, it's possible that they decided to launch a legendary comeback with sub-standard material and are holding out the big guns for the die-hards who actually buy the record.

Oh, who am I kidding?

I checked Metacritic, and the record has a meta-score of 64, which is falls barely into the category of "good" by Metacritic's standards, but that apparently doesn't mean anything because no one writes bad reviews of new music.  Of the 100-odd albums listed on the sidebar, there's not a single one listed as "bad", and only a handful listed as "okay".  For perspective, Mariah Carey's "E=MC2" is at 63 and Madonna's "Hard Candy" is at 65.  Neither is selling.

Okay, since I started writing this, the score has jumped to 69, putting it on par with AC/DC's latest disappointment.

The biggest problem is that everything about it is stamped "early 90's"; even the title feels dated.  And by "dated" I of course mean "stupid".  What was mildly clever 20 years ago is a bit silly now--especially since we've all heard the joke many many times over.  Christ, I mean, they just hosted the Olympics.  The world moved on--didn't you get the memo, Axl?

Also, the band doesn't really exist--everyone else has moved on to other projects; apparenly Axl didn't get that memo either.  And the philosophy behind the album reflects a 90's music-industry mindset.  The last new material we got from GN'R was the dually released set of Use Your Illusion records.  Those sold very well: they debuted at #1 and #2 (pretty good, since they were released on the same day), and a band that is thoroughly on top of its game could maybe follow that up with a "triple-album", which is how Chinese Democracy was conceived.  Now, Democracy is the first disc in a "trilogy" (equally pretentious in my eyes) to be released by 2012.  Well, it only took 17 years for the first disc, so I think 3-4 years for the other 2/3 is totally reasonable.  I jest.  I think we can safely expect delays.  Or who knows, maybe they'll hit a groove.

It's also worth noting that, as with every other 90's band that has regrouped for the 21st century, modern production values kind of undermine the sound.  Glam rock was about putting 5 awesome musicians in a room and capturing the magic.  The new album sounds a bit too... well, polished, a little less real.  Smashing Pumpkins new material suffers from this.  A post-boy-band gloss over 90's-rock composition?  It's ever-so-slightly jarring.

But will it sell?

Hard to say, there are an awful lot of variables at play.  First off, it's available exclusively through Best Buy (seriously, Axl, if you're not going to read the memos, I'm just going to stop sending them).  That said, GN'R's retrospective sold extremely well, proving that they still have at least some kind of fan base.  And it's got the whole "train-wreck" going for it.  So it might.  It easily could.  Nothing's really selling these days, but maybe this will.

I don't expect parts 2 and 3 to sell, though.  Because I think people will be thoroughly over Axl by 2012 or 2016, or whenever he actually delivers them (he's on pace for 2042)--just send us a memo, k?  K.

Seriously, though, unless the whole act gets back together (or at least 3/4 of it... okay, Slash at a minimum), maybe for a Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame induction, I can't see the public keeping up interest.  Frankly, I'm a little surprised anyone has held on this long.  Axl has dicked around the public for too long, reneging on his promises to fans, cancelling shows, et al.

We'll see.

]{p

Review: The Brothers Bloom

Man, this has been my week for pre-screenings. It's almost like living in LA again, except that it's currently 26 degrees outside.

It doesn't do that in LA.

The Brothers Bloom is the latest... erm... second film from writer/director Rian Johnson. His previous film, Brick, is a detective noir set in a California high school and, as far as I'm concerned, one of the most perfect movies ever committed to celluloid. While Brick had a production budget of half a million dollars (which is not much for a film with several recognizable stars in it) and was filmed at Johnson's childhood haunts, it works on the strength of clever dialog, beautiful (if quirky) cinematography, and a well-written story.

Brilliance on a budget--but what happens when you give the ingenue some real money to play with on the strength of a cobbled-together debut? Will it be an Empire Strikes Back or a Southland Tales?

The good news: The Brothers Bloom is wonderfully entertaining. Is it better than Brick? Well, that's hard to answer, because it's a very, very different type of movie. The only carry-overs are a couple of cameos. Nora Zehetner, dressed up as what could be a femme fatale, shows up for about a minute and flirts with Adrian Brody. This is about 59-and-a-half seconds longer than Joseph Gordon-Levitt's whip-pan, blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in which he has no lines but is dressed up as what could be a private investigator.

Okay, Johnson's cousin Nathan still did the music, and I'm sure several crew members came back, but nothing about Brothers feels like a re-tread, unlike the aforementioned Southland Tales. The comparison is worth a moment's pause. Richard Kelly's debut Donnie Darko is an incomprehensible (or at least under-explained) sci-fi tale peppered with brilliant character moments, an ironically-cool 80's-tastic soundtrack, and perhaps the weirdest iconic antagonist ever. Thusly, it has achieved a cult of loyal followers, gets regularly re-screened at art house theatres (you know it's art-house because of the spelling). Then Tales came out, which was equally incomprehensible but somewhat less enjoyable (I'm told--I haven't bothered with it). It attempted to expound upon the Darko-verse sci-fi mythos, only on a more sprawling, epic scale, but really all it did was convince us that Donnie Darko was a fluke--a happy accident that will not soon be reproduced.

But I digress.

The Brothers Bloom is a fairy tale of con artists. It's the story of two brothers, Stephen and Bloom (their surname is never given, which makes the title something of an oddity--but not like a Quantum of Solace level oddity, although I've read somewhere that maybe "Bloom" is their last name, we just never learn Bloom's first name) who grew up bouncing between foster homes. Their finely-tuned mischief develops into a full-fledged confidence scheme that inspires them to pursue a livelihood of it--only they put the "artist" in "con artist". The creative genius is the older brother, Stephen (played by Mark Ruffalo) who is ever in search of the perfect con or a genuine "wow" from his compatriots. His brother wants freedom--or maybe love. He doesn't know what he wants, but he wants out. They are assisted by a Japanese explosives expert named Bang-Bang. She has maybe three spoken words in the entire film and steals every single scene she touches. Lastly, there's Rachel Weisz as Penelope, the beautiful (if quirky) mark.

The elaborate ruse will take them from New Jersey to Greece to Prague to Mexico. The dialog is witty, sharp and at times Suessian. The shots are gorgeous, and the sight gags are out of this world. I think most of the budget actually went towards explosions and wrecking expensive cars--none of which are all that plot-important, but they're all quite funny. In fact, what I think I liked third-most about this film is the way it laughs in the face of cool. It never tries to be cool, and most of the "cool" things that happen are just there to frame the characters and their stories. Penelope drives a bright yellow Lamborghini... into things.  She can juggle chainsaws, but she can't keep up a conversation.  Stephen gets an upsetting telegram which he burns defiantly, only to realize that he had nowhere to put the flaming thing, which resulted in about 15 seconds of nervous stomping.  There are no fancy computer interfaces--their schemes are laid out on crudely-scrawled flowcharts.  Even the plot-driving "con" plays second fiddle to its participants.

Sadly, this is where things break down a bit.  You can't have a con-film without an elaborate con-ending, and while the ending is unexpected and totally in-line with the characters, the justification for it seems a bit flimsy.  In fact, the whole last-quarter or so drags ever-so-slightly, which takes the overall rating a notch down from "perfect" to "damned good".  My other complaint is the late-arriving antagonist Diamond Dog, a former mentor who is distractingly over-the-top and mysterious.  There is obvious bad blood between DD and his former protoges, but it's never explained fully.  I don't normally have a problem with that, but to have such an unlikely villain (cape, eyepatch and all) show up out of the blue was awkward.  But there was plenty of unexplained background that did work--one of my favorite bits involved Bloom commenting on Bang-Bang's choice of getaway car, a '79 Caddy, which he described as "controversial".

(Ham-handed segue in 3...2..1...)

In addition to background information, there was plenty of good background action, which may be my second-most favorite thing about this flick.  Film is, above all, a visual medium, and there was always something going on visually that told the story.  There's a hilarious bit with a sugar dispenser in an early scene that not only entertains, but tells the viewer a great deal more about the brother's relationship than the dialog that they speak over it, which gives the movie plenty of layers through which to tell the tale.

All of it adds up to a movie that is smart--and this is my first-most favorite thing: a good, well-written story.  And in that regard, it doesn't matter what it's about.  It could be about siamese twins who run a flower shop, but as long as it's well-written, I'll see it and I'll enjoy it.  So often these days it's about the pitch, but there are many things that I love dearly where the premise turned me off, but great story-telling won me over (off the top of my head, Finding Nemo and The West Wing).  Conversely, that are fabulous premises that have completely alienated me with bad writing (I'm looking at you, 24).

Rian Johnson seems to understand this.  This is why he can take such wacky story ideas and turn them into fully-fleshed stories with compelling characters and strong narratives.  Indeed, an overarching theme of The Brothers Bloom is the value (and potential profit) of a well-written story, best summarized by Bloom, who is quoting his brother:

"There are no unwritten lives, only badly-written ones."

Geek Rant: What's Up With the Wii?

Ah the Wii... how you taunt my fanboyism.

I'm inexplicably torn.  I loved the idea when I first heard about it, loved it when I finally got to try one out, loved it when I first owned one.  Still love playing it today.  But something feels a bit off.  Almost like it's not a real gaming console... I can't quite explain it.

Granted, my enthusiasm for the Wii is at least realistic.  I am well aware of its short-comings compared with other 7th gen systems.  The 360 and PS3 (incidentally, did you notice that all of these can be easily represented with 3 characters--to say nothing of the PSP or the excessively brief DS) both have more computing horsepower and the 360 has, hands-down, the best controller of the generation.  The Wii also wants desperately for on-board disk space, and the online gameplay is pretty limited, and the motion controls are sometimes a bit unresponsive.

And the motion controls are gimmicky-yes, I admit it, but "gimmick" is not always a bad thing.  Nintendo has a long history of experimenting with gimmicks, many of which fail horribly--Virtual Boy, the Power Glove, the Power Pad (for that ill-fated menstruation game... okay, I apologize for that joke).  But then, there are the gimmicks that worked and were coopted by the competition, such as the now-ubiquitous analog stick or the Game Boy.  Then there are the gimmicky accessories like the Light-Zapper that not only worked, but worked extremely well and added whole new levels of depth and interactive fun to game-playing.

Or would have, if there were more than three games developed for it.  Were there even three?  I can think of Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley. Surely there was at least a 3rd.  Right?  Anybody?

Maybe that's the problem with the Wii's motion controls--they're underutilized.  The Wii is simply untapped potential.  

Yeah, that's it.

The games put out by Nintendo (including franchise favorites Mario, Zelda, Metroid, MarioKart, and Smash Bros) have all been well-received and make at least some kind of use of the new controls.  But 3rd parties seem focused on releasing graphics-intense games with negligible gameplay rather than trying to create something interactive and fun.  I'm trying to think of games that make good use of the Wiimote's motion controls, and I'm having a hard time coming up with anything, especially anything 3rd-party.  There are plenty of good games that don't invoke movement at all (Super Smash Bros. Brawl) or do so only superfluously (Super Mario Galaxy comes to mind).  The infrared control gets some nominal traction star-collecting in SMG or in the few shooters out there (a la Metroid Prime 3: Corruption) and point-and-click fare (Zack & Wiki or the oddly-appealling Trauma Center games).  But as far as motion controls go...

Well, okay, MarioKart is dead-on.  As is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, although you could argue that the controls are superfluous since the exact same game is available on GameCube.  And I haven't played it, but I understand Boom Blox is pretty good.  Then you have the shallow games with good motion controls (Mercury Meltdown Revolution) and the good games with okay motion controls (WarioWare: Smooth Moves).  And WiiSports fits in there somewhere in the "okay-ish" section, because baseball and bowling are great, tennis is frustratingly bad, boxing is in-between, and golf is too difficult to call because no one actually plays it.

Mostly you end up with games that don't need motion controls having them tacked on because of the Wiimote's shortage of buttons and lack of a second analog stick.  In Sonic Unleashed, which was released this week, the motion controls are completely optional.  Other games force them on you, to mixed results.  Red Steel is abysmal and with Marvel Ultimate Alliance they just get in the way, resulting in players attacking the air or rotating the camera because someone set something down to scratch himself or take a drink.  And due to the limited processing power, 3rd party franchises either skip the Wii altogether (Grand Theft Auto) or make a dumbed-down versions with some motion addends.  I think that's what bugs me the most.  Third party developers seem to regard the Wii as the retarded kid brother of this console generation.

Inexplicably.  I mean, the damned thing is outselling it's competition by huge margins.  After two years, you can finally find without going to three different stores (or... at all).  But it's going to take some special attention from developers to develop worthwhile gameplay at the sacrifice of fancy graphics.  Instead, we get shoddy half-baked ports of blingy 360 games.  The most grevious (pardon the pun) offender is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.  I mean, the motion controls mostly work (that is, you generally do on screen what you sort of think you're supposed to do), but the presentation is just poor and the game is so waggle-intense that it's hard to play more than a level without wearing out your right arm.  But the Wii version is still kind of fun (whereas my friend with the 360 version gave up at the end).

Ironically, the Wii port of these games is usually a near-clone of the PS2 port.  What's wrong with that?  Well, the PS2 is last-gen, so why is Sony still putting out new games for it?  Okay, full disclosure, I have no love for the PS3.  I like the 360--probably won't ever get one, but I enjoy playing it.  But I tend to regard the PS3 as a bit of a tragedy, all those extra horses to pull the weight of a video format no one cares about and its sadly short list of exclusive titles.  Sad, really--because the PS2 was indeed the king of 6th gen.  But when Square Enix pulled it's deal with Sony to release Final Fantasy XIII as a PS3 exclusive, you know there's trouble.

I digress.

Here's my other gripe: if the Wii is supposed to be about gaming as a social experience, where are the local multiplayer games?  Specifically, where are the local multi-player shooters?  The Wii is born for shooters, and if you can't go to friends house and all sit around blowing each other's brains out on split-screen, what can you do?  Actually, this isn't just a Wii complaint, because it's hard to find 360 shooters with local split-screen multiplayer (at least we have Halo, right?), and the 360 charges you for online play.

At least the Wii let's you do that for free.

]{p

On the Evolution of Controllers

In the beginning was Pong.  Your controller was a dial on a stick.

The second generation of video game consoles was dominated by the Atari 2600, which gave us a joystick with a single button.  Other systems of the day included ColecoVision and the Emerson Arcadia, both of which had numbered button-pads that were as functional as they were not-awkward.  That is to say, not very.  Other early systems from Magnavox and Sega--not to be outdone--used and entire keyboard in conjunction with a joystick.  These were simpler times, when Atari's came with wood paneling.  Meanwhile, a fledgling company called Nintendo released a line of single-game hand-held LCD games under the somewhat misleading name "Game & Watch" (originally designed to be a game that you wore on your wrist that also told time... not that anyone could see anything on those itty-bitty screens) using such complicated controls as "left" and "right".

But it was in 1983, after the Video Game Crash of '83, that console systems began to resemble what we think of today with the Nintendo Entertainment System.  The NES controller had a directional pad with up, down, left, and right.  A button labeled "start" that was used for pausing and menu selections, a button labeled "select" that might as well not have existed, and two buttons labeled, from left-to-right "B" and "A".  This button-dislyxia will plague Nintendo for years.  The Sega Master System and Atari 7800 were on the market as well, but no one cared.

This 3rd generation of video game consoles also saw the widespread acceptance of gimmicky peripherals.  R.O.B., the Light Zapper, the Power Glove, the NES Advantage (with it's joystick, rapid toggles, and oddly-slanted buttons), hell, the Japanese version even had a microphone built into controller-2.

The foundations were laid for the modern controller, but it was the 4th generation, the 16-bit era, that truly saw the genius of Nintendo.  They realized that what people really needed were more buttons.  The oddly-spelled Turbo-Grafx 16 was the first out, and it used the basic Nintendo 8-bit controller layout.  Sega had the foresight to add another button, as well as a "Start" to the controller for it's new Genesis console.  Neo-Geo added a fourth button, although oddly decided to put them all in a row rather than something that might be, you know, playable.  But Nintendo went all out for the Super NES.  In addition to the bass-ackwards A-B buttons, it added reversed X and Y buttons in a diamond configuration that mirrored the directional pad and--and--left and right shoulder buttons conveniently labeled "L" and "R".  They were geniuses of controller design.

Who then drank the Kool-Aid.  Gen 5 is where the road narrows.  No one cares about the Amiga, 3DO, Jaguar, or Saturn (Sega having pissed off its fan base with meaningless add-ons like the 32x or the Sega CD rather than continuing to develop games for it's still-popular Genesis).  In this game, there were only two players: Sony and Nintendo.  Sony's PlayStation was a revolution, it's 32-bit processor, it's crisp (if boxy) graphics, it's disc system that allowed for multiple discs (and ease of piracy).  It's external save cards.  Everything about it was a breath of fresh air, except the controller, which was a button-for-button copy of the SNES pad.  Okay, they changed the names of the A, B, X, and Y buttons and replaced them with shapes.  But they really shouldn't have.  You can't type a shape.  Some are polysyllabic, so you can't internalize them as easily (seriously, say it with me: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, triangle, circle... shit).  And because they're obsessed with backwards compatibility, they haven't bothered to remove this cumbersome nomenclature.

For all the flaws with the Nintendo 64's controller, it did introduce the analog stick and the rumble pack, which would not be available on the PSX until... well... they built controllers that did that.  The 64 controller still had the D-pad and left shoulder button, but the analog stick had rendered that entire wing of the controller vestigile.  The "select" button was gone, but under the analog stick was a trigger-style button arbitrarily called "Z".  I say "arbitrarily" because X and Y had been removed, replaced with four buttons, all called "C".  The orientation of A and B had been switched from slanting up to slanting down (to make room for the C buttons), meaning that if you had some way to play a SNES game on a 64, the X would now be C-left, Y would correspond to B, B would correspond to A, and A would correspond to C-down.  So there was a learning curve to it, but it worked, you got used to it, and you remembered to dust off the D-pad from time to time and/or replace the whole damn thing when the stick wore out.  But surely they'd do be better with the next generation controller, right?

Um, no.  As far as I'm concerned, the GC controller is broken.  It tried to get back to basics, but it just failed so stupidly.  The analog stick and D-pad were swapped, well, that makes sense.  The C buttons had been made into a second analog stick, placed in a secondary position on the right side--whatever, it works.  And that's where things stop working.  The thing about the diamond configuration on the SNES, or the PSX, is that you can actually get to the buttons and, more important, you can press more than one at a time without difficulty.  So what does Nintendo do?  They make a big ol' A button and have the others orbit it like freaking satellites.  The B button is easy enough to find, but X and Y, in addition to being weirdly shaped (and small, and easy-to-miss), are the same color--which wouldn't be a problem except that they aren't labeled in a way that can be read quickly.  All the buttons have their labels depressed into the plastic, rather than painted on in a contrasting color.  The L and R buttons are curved, which means they take more effort (and time) to press, and they're dual-sensor, so sometimes they mean different things depending on how far you depress them.  Then there's the inexplicable Z button tacked on there next to the R.

At least Sony had the good sense to not try and fix what wasn't broken.  The PS2 controller is remarkably similar to that of it's predecessor, only with two analog sticks and two more shoulder buttons.  Long live SNES controls!  New-comer Xbox had a controller that was similar but with the left analog stick swapped with the D-pad, trigger-style shoulder buttons, A, B, X, and Y (in alphabetical order, no less) and also a black and white button for... the hell of it.  Actually quite usable, the thing would have been perfect if it weren't the size of a small Buick.  Lastly, there was the Dreamcast, Sega's final console, whose controller had a worst-of-both-worlds approach, having fewer buttons and being even larger.

So then came gen-7.  Xbox dropped the black and white buttons, replacing them with shoulder "bumpers" and making possibly the best controller ever.  The PS3 is the PS2 without a cable.  So what foulness does Nintendo have cooked up?

The Wiimote.  It has a D-pad where you can't reach it quickly, an A button under your thumb, a trigger-style B button, +, -, and "house" buttons, and 1 and 2 buttons under your palm.  You can connect it to various peripherals, but most games require the nunchuck, which has an analog stick plus C and Z.  Although you can also connect a "classic" controller, which is a SNES controller with 2 analog sticks.

That said, the Wiimote is one of the most sophisticated input devices ever created.  It reads infrared, has accelerometers to track movement.  But, really, how do we know that motion control and infrared targeting are the future of video games?

Because Sony copied it.

]{p

Spam-a-cide, part 3

So, remember my spam experiment?  To see how big a number I could get in my spam filter without deleting anything before the sheer scope of it drove me bonkers?  Remember how I was at 94 messages after a day and a half.

Well, it's been a week and I'm up to... 175?  What happened?

This happened.  Apparently 75% (or so) of the world's spam all came from one web host in San Jose, CA, and that host has been shut down.  So, if you were interested in purchasing stock in McColo Corp... don't.

Speaking of stock.  Dude, where's the economy?

]{p

Review: Milk

Abby and I caught a pre-screening of Milk, the new Gus Van Sant film that chronicles the rise and fall of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to public office in California (namely, member of the San Francisco board of City Supervisors), as well as his pivotal role in the American Gay Rights movement of the late 70's.

This is the kind of film Van Sant should direct. He has a tendency to let the camera serve as "witness", which sometimes works, but often doesn't. I remember watching Elephant and being somewhat distracted by a two minute tracking shot that followed a guy walking around a high school... not talking to anyone... just walking around. Slowly. With the exception of the opening shot, I think every single frame in that film is at eye-level, because the camera is simply and observer.

The pseudo-documentary nature of Milk lends itself more to this manner of filmmaking. Van Zant uses quite a lot of archival footage to add to the documentary feel (i.e., drive home the realism) and often as establishing shots, which procludes the need to re-create 1978 San Francisco. Although Castro Street, where most of the movie was shot, was faithfully de-aged.

The story is bookended with Harvey's relationship with his long-time lover and campaign manager Scott. The middle plays out, well, like a Wikipedia entry about Harvey Milk. I could complain about the pacing a little, it's slow and you never quite know where it's going, but the story gets told and the end result is quite moving. And in what I think is a particularly well-crafted bit of narrative, Harvey's death (this is not a spoiler, it's told to you in the first 5 minutes of the film) looms over the ending, and the tension created by the arrival of death threats and the knowledge that something tragic is about to happen keeps the last thirty minutes from getting dull.

All in all, it's a well-told tale featuring a superb cast (I smell an Oscar for Penn, and perhaps some recognition for Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black). James Franco was particularly enjoyable.

And it is unabashedly forthright with the sexuality of its characters. Don't expect to see man-sex, but there's plenty of kissing and snuggling.

Worth seeing.

]{p

So What's a Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Exactly?

So I was reading this article about the 9 most inappropriate soundtrack choices of all time (care of Cracked) which references The Vapors' Turning Japanese and Timbuk3's The Future's So Bright I've Gotta Wear Shades, two of the three most well-known instances of "Hey, that song's not about what you think it's about" (The third being Every Breath You Take by The Police).

Now, there's always a certain schadenfreude on the part of writers when their work is misunderstood--it grants them the opportunity to appear both wise and condescending (silly listener!).  But I've been mulling these over a bit and I've come to the following conclusion: widespread misinterpretation is a failure on the part of the songwriter.  The fact that people dance to Every Breath You Take at their weddings is not tragically ironic so much as it indicates a flaw in the way the song was crafted.  And don't get me wrong, it's a great song; it's just not actually about what Sting intended it to be about.

Let me further stipulate that I have nothing against ambiguity in songcraft.  I'm a child of the 90's; there are myriad songs I love that are not obviously about anything or that are obviously about something but it's not immediately apparent what that something is.  The classic example in the case of the latter would be Pearl Jam's Jeremy, which references a specific, horrific event but does not spell out the bloody details in the lyric sheet--but it came out at a time when MTV was ubiquitous and the video told all.  Just to be balanced, for an example of the former, look at, I dunno, anything at all by Stone Temple Pilots or Smashing Pumpkins.

I like ambiguity.  I like the fact that Seal never prints lyric sheets because he wants people to interpret his songs independent of, you know, what he actually wrote.  Granted, Don't Cry is hardly a labyrinth of imagism, but you see what I'm getting at.  What I'm taking umbrage with here is the instance in which a song is obviously about something but the writer insists that it's obviously about something else.

Of course the grand-daddy of all misinterpreted song meanings is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, with its colorful acid-rock imagery and title that can be abbreviated "L.S.D."  Lennon always insisted that it wasn't directly a reference to the drug, but rather was inspired by a picture with the same title drawn by his five-year-old son.  While I would hesitate to call that bad writing, Lennon and McCartney have both admitted to oversight, that they simply didn't notice the initials of the song until it was pointed out to them years after Sgt. Pepper's release.  And, to be fair, it was the 60's, there was a lot more cause for members of the counter-culture to veil the less wholesome bits of their public fare--this was, after all, the same era that saw The Kingsmen formally investigated by the F.B.I. over the possibility of cursing in their cover of Louie Louie.  That the misinterpretation has persisted is more of a cultural phenomenon than anything else.

Okay, all things disclaimed, let's get on to some unqualified bad writing.

Turning Japanese was, and in some circles still is, thought to be about masturbation--the verses involve the song's narrator looking at a picture of his former love, and the joke was that a man in coitus makes an expression similar to that which he would make if he was imitating a Japanese person.  The authors of the song insist that it's not about masturbation, but rather the way that Japanese manufacturing was outpacing American manufacturing in the 80's tech industries.  Nice story, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.  The lyric sheet gives no mention of technology, so if that's what they were going for, they failed miserably.  One could make the argument that it's nonsensical, that they had the bones of a love song constructed, then started it off one day with that classic Japanese-sounding pentatonic riff (as a joke) and liked it so much that they worked the chorus around it.  I totally buy that.  But I can't help wondering if The Vapors thought they were being extremely clever when, in reality, they were only being moderately clever.  Perhaps they simply never expected anyone to figure out the masturbation reference and had the "tech" story ready as an explainer "just in case".  I think it's possible that they simply suffered from a gross lack of subtlety, only to be rousingly trumped by The DaVinyls' I Touch Myself a few years later.  Nowadays the idea of a song about wanking off is nothing special--hell, there were two of those on Green Day's breakout album, including the lead single Longview.

Timbuk3, conversely, seem to have overdone subtlety.  With The Future's So Bright... they constructed what is arguably the most upbeat song for any graduation party ever, ever.  However, they claim that it's actually about the grim prospect of a nuclear holocaust, which makes it tragically ironic.  No.  No, I don't think so.  Here's my reasoning: if your song is about nuclear holocaust, it ought to have words in it like "bomb" or "explosion" or "death" or something.  "Nuclear" comes up, always in the context of "I study nuclear science".  But most nuclear scientists don't grow up to make bombs.  Many of them work in nuclear reactors, power plants--signs of a bright future and advancing technology.  Bad writing, pure and simple: if you're going to write a song about something, make sure that the song at least hints at what it's about.  There is no doubt in my mind that Timbuk3 intended the song to be about bombs, and knowing that does give the song a bit of a macabre sheen.  In fact, there is even a slower version of the song with an added verse that mentions "blowin'" things.  But the definitive version of the song--i.e., the one that people have actually heard--is bereft of any clue that might point the listener towards the intended subject.  Fail.

None of this is too surprising: The Vapors and Timbuk3 were one-hit wonders, a status that might have been avoided if they were better at songwriting.  Our last example is a bit more in the vein of the Beatles song mentioned above: The Police's Every Breath You Take, which is about a stalker but which is regarded by the casual listener as being simply a song of unrequieted love.  Sting is not a bad songwriter--he's had an expansive career as a solo artist and as the front man for The Police.  He's also written many mainstream songs about misplaced love and awkward relationships--e.g., Don't Stand So Close to Me about an affair between a student and teacher, or After the Rain which tells the story of a princess who falls briefly in love with a thief (and implied rapist) who breaks into her room on the night before her pre-arranged marriage.  Why shouldn't we believe him that the song is about a stalker?

Because it isn't.  Read the lyrics.  Listen to it.  It isn't about a stalker.  Maybe he meant for it to be, but it just isn't.  It is, pure and simple, an unrequieted love song.  Yes, some of the lyrics are vaguely stalker-ish, but isn't that true of most love songs?  The only hard-and-fast clue is a musical one: under the word "you" in the line "I'll be watching you," at that cadence the song drops to a minor key.

Not good enough.  To paraphrase my wife in her rants about modern art (and she's an art historian, so she can speak with some authority here), art needs to work without explanation.  It can be the doorway into a larger world, but if you have to read the description in order to appreciate the piece at all, then the piece is a failure.  If you have to have played the video game or read the comic book in order to appreciate the film based on it, it's a failure.  This applies to just about anything.  It can be intentionally vague, it can have fan-service, but it needs to work as a stand-alone project as well (with the possible exception of sequels, which can be seen as chapters in a larger work).  Every Breath... works as a stand-alone artistic work, as an unrequieted love song.  So that's what it is.

With due apologies to Sting.

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Spam-a-cide, part 2

In ironic news:

I just got a pop up advertising a spam blocker.

Spam-a-cide!

I've randomly decided to not empty my spam filter, as I am wont to do on a roughly daily basis. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations (as well as the numbers on Abby's account) suggest that I can look forward to around 1500 or more before my spam folder starts to auto-delete messages. Of course, this has less to do with the volume I can accumulate within a 30 day span and more to do with how high that number gets before I can't take it any more and delete the lot.

Right now, I'm at 93.

Make that 94.

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Casting a Ballot Into HELL!!!!

This past election saw a multitude of Catholic voters flee the pro-life GOP.  Many of these voters are Democrats anyway, but the Catholic church (and other churches as well) have consistently used the pulpit as a pro-life campaign platform--more so perhaps in this election than in the past.  Even more ridiculously, a South Carolina priest (in a move that strikes me as being particularly Jonathan Edwards-y) has instructed his parishioners that they are not to accept Communion if they voted for Obama.

This is a big deal.  To Catholics, you can't get into heaven if you don't receive the sacraments.  I'm reminded of my grandfather, who was told that he couldn't receive communion because he had divorced his first wife.  Then they told him that he could receive communion again eventually, but only if he kept up his tithing.

He's not a church-goer anymore.

This will not end well for the Catholic church, methinks.  To most Americans, religion is a luxury, not a lifeblood.  And many Americans have adopted the belief that a Republican victory would make an ailing nation even sicker--they see a vote for Obama as an investment in their children's future.  Loved ones will win out over ideals nearly every time.

Which is not to say that this swing isn't tempered by a certain amount of cynicism.  The Republicans have, after all, had eight years to overturn Roe v. Wade--eight years without anything that resembles action at the federal level.  And it's this side of ten years ago that the Catholic church erupted in child molestation scandal.  If the Church cares so much about children, why was it so consistently willing to disregard the children of its own parishioners?

No doubt the irony of this is lost on the clergy, but not the parishioners.

This will definitely not end well for the church.  Maybe this is me being... well... cynical, but in my experience, anything that forces someone to critically evaluate their religious beliefs is going to gently nudge that person away from said beliefs--and this is doubly true for religions that are long on ceremony.  This actually has less to do with the nature of religion than the nature of believers.  I know some devout people, but I would argue that they are the exception rather than the rule.

But it breaks down like this: people like structure, they want security, they want to socialize, they want an understanding of the world, and they want to believe that they are basically good people doing a little something to make the world a better place.  For good or for ill, religion provides all of this in a world that is uncertain and amoral.  Which is why many churches end up with a few crazy-devout people and a lot of basically-good people who want a weekend pep talk and a chance to meet socially with like-minded others.  And you can fire them up with groupthink or appeals to basic emotional reactions (which is why abortion and homosexuality are hot-button issues, in spite of the fact that there's far more call in the Bible for things like, you know, feeding the poor), but reality has to set in eventually.

Just like the repeal of the Fish-On-Fridays Act caused people (as in, people I'm related to) to evaluate their beliefs and decide that the Catholic church is a bunch of hooey, this "Obama = Hell" platform is going to make people reconsider their allegiance and either transfer to a church that better-resembles a social club, or just give up on God altogether.  Because real people know that abortion is not the only issue on the table.

Because idealism is a luxury, and these are not luxurious times.

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The New York Onion?

If you haven't seen this yet, it's worth a look.  It's loading uber-slow right now due to high traffic.

New York Times Special Edition.

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Speech-To-Text Still Works

Google Reader now translates posts for you.

Sow eye ham pose-ting dis four thee soul, hen-tire porpoise hove missing width hit.

Spellcheck that, if ewe dare!

Love/Hate the Internets

This is why I love/hate the internets. When I first espied this, these were the only answers. They were then immediately followed by five posts (my own included) that actually answered the question.

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From: prc1...@yahoo.com - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:15 pm Not yet rated show options Did McCain or Obama win? We have not heard yet in china. Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: osca...@gmail.com - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:16 pm Not yet rated show options Nope... it was James Earl Jones Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: jo_jo - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:17 pm Not yet rated show options Sorry, we cancelled the elections due to presidential edict # 493. Better luck next time. Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: canonshooterh...@gmail.com - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:19 pm Not yet rated show options daa uhh....daaa..uhhh......McCain! Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: nberla...@gmail.com - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:26 pm Rating: (5 users) show options Don't worry about it comrade, we will soon join you in lacking Internet access as well. Forget america, its no longer worth considering. How can someone move to China is my question. At least the relatively honest there, and I'd be 1 foot taller than everyone else! Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: needlyf...@yahoo.com - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:29 pm Rating: (4 users) show options Oh! Almost forgot... We're not paying back any of that money we borrowed. We figure it closes the account on saving you from the Japs. Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: jroth...@hotmail.com - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:34 pm Not yet rated show options due to ling lines at the polls, all the republicans were asked to vote today. so will find out soon who the HNIC is. - Show quoted text - Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: Leonid L - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:38 pm Rating: (1 user) show options All of the 160 million of the Ralph Nader supporters decided their vote won't matter anyway, and stayed at home. Reply Reply with quote » Rate this post:

From: mikecin...@gmail.com - view profile Date: Wed, Nov 5 2008 2:40 pm Rating: (2 users) show options Obama got shot, McCain had a stroke, Bush ODed on coke. So Cheany thought in the best interest of the country he would be prez for the next 4 years. Oh by the way he appointed Pallin VP.