I walked in to a pizza place today and a bum standing outside, out of nowhere, asked me, "Hey do you sell weed?" and I said, "No man." and went inside.
When I walked out with my pizza the same guy asked, "Hey do you have any spare change?" and I said, "No man." and walked away.
Here’s the thing – dude just admitted to me that he was looking to buy pot. This is what happens to money that you give away.
It’s been a while since I’ve been excited by Chan Marshall’s work. 2006’s album The Greatest wasn’t exactly, err, the best original music she’s produced, and since then she’s continued this country and soul binge with a covers album that, while likely garnering her industry respect, isn’t quite where my tastes lie. Even 2003’s You Are Free, while retaining the old ‘Cat Power’ style, couldn’t quite live up to the haunting beauty of her previous body of work. It seemed that Cat Power was perhaps an indie phenomenon relegated to 90s relevance.
In early August, a new decade will bring a new original Cat Power album, Sun. From the early single, Ruin, I am glad to hear that maybe some of the old charm is back. The salsa-esque piano sets the tone and Chan’s vocals do the rest, creating a simple and effective song that brightens the mood with every listen. While the emotion on the album remains to be seen, history has shown Cat Power to use a poppy single to lure attention to a more diverse collection so it’s hard to say what is in store for us in August. Needless to say, I’m actually intrigued this go around and will report back with the reveal.
Futurama is before the time of Why I Hate Everything so I won’t give it a lengthy review aside from saying it was a great animated series in its heyday. When Cartoon Network renewed the series to release 4 episodic movies, it was obvious that some of the old quality was still around. However, the regular tv season that followed was hit or miss.
Realistically, any classic animation series like this is going to suffer a bit from nostalgia. That’s why it was so great that the first ten minutes of the new 2012 season had constant jokes that reminded me of the good old days. This is the same show, folks. Here’s hoping the season keeps to the same bar.
This advertising campaign isn’t anything special- it’s just another gimmick to try to stir up a few months of excitement for an old product, so I won’t dwell on the big picture. The punch top can allows easy hole poking in the top to let air in so the beer streams out easily instead of in the familiar ‘glug glug’ fashion.
Doesn’t anybody find it strange that in a commercial extolling the benefits of pouring beer from a can, that everybody is just drinking straight from the can? Maybe it’s tough to show a bunch of men roughing it in the wilderness and then breaking out the paper cups.
Also, everybody should be well aware that there is already a way to punch the top of cans built into the can. It’s the tab at the top that pops the first hole. Couldn’t Miller Lite be a bit more ingenious about this design and have you spin the tab around to use it again on a smaller hole? Meh, drumsticks are cooler.
Full disclosure: the amount of nerd hype surrounding this movie in the last couple of weeks has predisposed me to dislike it. However, if my review of The Avengers can be counted as like company, I’d say I can still be fairly objective in these situations. Just to play it safe, I went on a media blackout and didn’t watch any trailers or discuss the upcoming movie at all. I only tangentially heard that the whole thing was “kind of an Alien prequel” and entered the theater with zero expectations. So given all of this, how did Prometheus fare?
The answer is a resounding ‘awful’.
Prometheus is set in 2093, in the same universe as the Alien saga but with a disconnected crew on a separate spaceship. Their mission is to find the origin of human life but things obviously go wrong. The problem is, in a film with this kind of clout, absolutely everything was so unabashedly generic and predictable that I almost thought Ridley Scott was pulling a Cabin in the Woods and making fun of action/suspense movies.
See if any of this sounds familiar to you: a collection of the world’s most dysfunctional scientists get stuck in a bad situation and find themselves slowly killed off until only a scrappy girl survives. Although this big picture is a tired joke, I can commend the writers for attempting a more ambitious A-story. The problem is that all the little butterfly wings that set the plot points aflutter are laughable. One scientist leads the team into a desolate series of tunnels and sends out robotic mappers to scout ahead. Once they reach their destination he gets creeped out and wants to abandon the team and head back on his own. After another sorry sack joins him, they proceed to immediately get lost. Here is the guy who everybody else was following because he was literally mapping out the entire tunnel network and has a fucking nav device in his hand and we are supposed to believe that he gets lost? So then he and the other guy are foibling around, completely freaked at of the possibility of encountering anything slightly alive UNTIL they find a little critter and proceed to lose all traces of self preservation and repeatedly poke it.
“Aww, check out this alien that looks like a pissed off cobra about to strike! It’s so cute!”
The ending even does Wile E. Coyote proud and features a sequence where the survivors are fleeing a spaceship wreckage by running in the same direction it is rolling towards them instead of simply sidestepping it. In case the audience isn’t infuriated enough, one of the characters actually trips and falls and *rolls sideways* out of the way while the other (more able) character continues to run along the path of destruction and dies.
The future technology in Prometheus isn’t very convincing either. It’s 2093 so many things are similar to today but of course there is all the spaceship technology. But when a couple scientists are getting mauled on the planet surface and no one is monitoring their activity, the captain of the ship wonders what happened to them and sends down a team to recover them. Let me see… the scientists were wired with cameras and radios and have been communicating successfully until they disappeared but what, there’s no way to check their recorded playback? I mean Jesus, the thought of not recording that shit today would be unheard of. Mixing modern technology with the plot tropes of yesteryear is lazy screenwriting.
Another futuristic failure? Prometheus has the worst guns you will ever see in a sci-fi movie EVER. The only time the gun resembling a pulse shotgun is used it is totally worthless. It looks like a toy gun that can’t even generate the recoil of a Nerf rifle.
Motivations are poorly handled in this film as well. First of all, the android-with-questionable-motives character from the other Alien movies returns but by the end of everything the reasons for some of his actions make absolutely no sense unless ‘doing crazy things to keep the audience guessing’ counts as a proper character arc these days. I will concede that at least the script attempts to maintain a mystery, but for every scarcely clever moment there are two others that can be seen a mile away. When it is obvious that one character is another’s daughter but for some reason the film pretends that you are too stupid to realize it, and then removes all subtlety out of a scene by inserting an excruciating reveal of “Father!”, I could take no more.
Also, why does old people makeup in movies still suck so bad? The aliens look more real than this guy.
So Prometheus is a crappy movie with forgettable characters acting out an overdone plot. What does it have? The obvious answer is, the alien. Not just any alien, but some strain of the classic Giger monster that is burned into our memory. But even here the movie fails us. The fan service is horrible – the original film was about science and explaining the biology and life cycle of the mysterious life form. This was a large part of the creature’s success and why it continues to be so iconic. Instead, Prometheus gives us an ‘anything goes’ mentality where the aliens have several forms that are very different from each other. Instead of a well thought out biology we are treated to an amalgamation of various shock tactics. The creators have specifically said that they didn’t want to do the same movie over again and wanted to break the cycle of showing what audiences expect. I can respect this, but then why make a movie that repeats all of the OTHER things that audiences have seen before, excluding the one thing that would have pleased us?
Prometheus is the classic case of a movie being worse because of its pedigree, though don’t think that means it would be considered good otherwise. But damn, at least the movie looks nice.
Here’s another high concept tv show, a format that seems to be all the rage since Lost aired. A mystery is introduced in episode one and the entire season (or series) is about unraveling the puzzle. Overall I think this is a good trend. It’s just that I have so little faith in network tv to deliver anything with any cohesive long-term fulfillment anymore. Even the mighty X-Files sputtered at the end.
The premise of Awake: Detective Britten was in a car accident with his wife and son and woke up to a world where one of them was dead, but when he went to sleep he woke up in another world where the other family member had died instead. So he’s now a man living two lives, both dealing with family tragedy. To keep things straight, Britten wears a red bracelet in the world that his wife is alive in and a green bracelet in the world that he lives with his son. Each reality has its own therapist that he sees who tries to convince him that theirs is the true world and the other is a dream. It’s a compelling personal story that provides a neat backdrop for weekly episodes.
I started watching the series for the novelty of it and was mildly amused. At the beginning it basically boiled down to two police procedurals in one episode, where clues from one world inform on the case in the other. But as the season progressed I became impressed at some of the interesting hooks that pulled between Britten’s alternate families. Awake is well constructed and many of the scenes are expertly driven by music and poignant emotional notes.
Early on it was evident that the show was being canceled and, as a fan of narrative, this was really the best thing that could happen to the plotline. A chance to tell an isolated story in a single series of episodes, without money or ratings dragging the plot one way or the other, or stretching any true climax across years. Instead, when the end starts rolling near the season’s final episodes the protagonist really rushes ahead to get things done. And again, I was impressed with some of the choices.
So then, what a letdown the finale is. Spoilers are necessarily ahead, so if the above sounds intriguing at all I would still recommend watching all the episodes. Just come back here for analysis after you finish the finale.
According to the series creator, Kyle Killen, this is the way he always intended the first season of Awake to end, whether or not the series would be renewed. He specifically references the debacle that was Lost, which had a meandering and blurry story, and said that tv execs these days "make sure that you have flagpoles that you’re heading toward" to ensure that audiences are given a satisfying payoff.
In the Awake season finale, one of the two worlds is starting to show signs that it is a dream and Detective Britten finally begins to accept this fact and says goodbye to a loved one. The whole season centered around this concept of ‘which world is real?’ and just flipping a coin and coming up with a result wasn’t going to be a satisfying enough conclusion. No, a savvy modern audience will need a grander twist, and it wasn’t hard to see that something was coming.
The worst thing you can ever do in a movie or tv show is have the main character wake up at the end and realize the whole thing was a dream. And that’s what the series creator says absolutely did not happen, and he doesn’t understand how anybody could take that interpretation away from the finale. Well, maybe it’s because THAT’S WHAT TOTALLY FUCKING HAPPENED ONSCREEN.
When you say things like, "I’ve seen some really interesting [theories] and I wouldn’t say that anyone is wrong" then you are admitting that the storyline doesn’t necessarily make sense. You are essentially saying that, ‘hey, if you enjoyed it, then whatever you think happened is what happened’. And that’s a giant cop out. Maybe that type of narrative has a place in poetry or even artsy films but getting cute with the script explanation in this case doesn’t fly. To me it’s a matter of function following form. If a movie is weird and dreamlike, like Lost Highway, then you can expect a fairly ambiguous ending. Awake is the opposite- it is literally about a police detective piecing together clues to solve a mystery, and audiences expect and demand something more substantial.
But the discussion gets deeper as the creator is interviewed after the final airing. Killen reveals that one of the worlds is indeed fake, and as the protagonist is just starting to accept the truth he regresses into realizing he could make up his own dream, and the ‘happy ending’ world is an even bigger and deeper lie that he chooses to immerse himself in. In other words, in a series which involves a heavy dose of psychosis and has two therapists telling the detective that he is crazy and can’t accept the truth, one of them is right. The ‘red’ world gets all crazy and is the obvious dream, Britten realizes ‘green’ is the reality, but then decides that he enjoyed his hallucinatory fabrications even more and creates a world where both his wife and son are alive. And I suppose overall I can accept this ending. It doesn’t fill in all the holes but it serves as an unexpected direction and completes a tragic arc. If Britten’s psyche is fractured even more in the end, well, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.
But then Killen plays noncommittal and says the reverse is also possible.
"In “red,” he’s in a place where he’s in prison and the person that ultimately destroyed his family is going to get away with it, so if anything were to cause your psyche to fracture and imagine a world where you do win, where you do catch the person…. I think it would be the horrible pressure of realizing you might be stuck in prison. That’s in some ways a just as compelling argument for “red.”"
Indeed, all the craziness in the red world that apparently reveals it as a dream world only happens right as Britten is about to fall asleep. It *could* have been a dream (except, of course, that Britten has never dreamed in this fashion over the entire series). But here’s the thing. Am I the only one here who is calling bullshit on the whole ‘one real, one fake’ scenario? If clues in each world helped him solve cases in the other, then either both or neither are dreams, right? This is classically where tv series, as opposed to films, fail to deliver on their mysteries. Over the course of a season it is exceedingly easy to throw in a twist that can’t be explained- call it a smoke monster (after Lost’s famous flub). Movies, on the other hand, are edited much more tightly *in general*, although I feel compelled to say that most horror movies still fail to deliver satisfying resolutions to all the creepy events they present us with.
In the end, Killen emphasizes that one world was real and the other was a dream and this series was about a man who couldn’t cope with reality. And I respect that straight-forward decision, but the creator goes on to say something disturbing. He admits that he left the door open for either one to be the reality, meaning he was content to let a few seasons drag on before finally choosing which direction to go. And here is where the lazy writing angle comes in, because without a defined world, any clues dropped during the episodes along the way become meaningless. Without a true reality, nothing needs to make sense, and years later when the show would wrap up, the audience is sure to be left with dangling questions.
Anyway, it always boggles my mind that creators of fiction never work these things out more than this. Maybe artsy folk don’t like being tied down by constraints but I’m a programmer by trade. I like making sense of things, breaking them down into logical parts and seeing how they really tie together. I like working a story backwards from its core elements and agreeing that it could plausibly play out as the writers present. To me that’s believability, and that’s more gripping than any number of inane plot twists you can throw at me.
Asus is a large Taiwanese computer manufacturer and the latest target of the hyper-offendable sexist brigade. You see, at a recent tradeshow an employee made this rather risqué tweet.
Of course this made the internets crazy. “OMG, Asus is sexist!” “I will never buy another motherboard from this company again!” First of all, good luck- Asus has a variety of parts in other company’s products so chances are you wouldn’t even know if you were supporting them. Secondly, while the CEO or anyone high up surely isn’t the gatekeeper of their social media message, I will concede that the remark is fairly inappropriate for an official company tweet. However, I’m more concerned with the indignant reaction. Is the comment really that bad?
This is how duplicitous the United States is about sex today. On one hand we have a culture that markets and praises attractiveness but on the other we are not allowed to speak on the subject. Don’t tell the pretty girl that she’s pretty because that’s sexist, and definitely don’t point out that she put on makeup so people would think she was pretty. The comment didn’t even use any crude language or sexual innuendo- the last time the public was in an outrage over the word ‘rear’ has got to be the 1950s.
Listen, I understand how this would be a rude comment if this was Hilary Clinton or someone at an event under a different context. I understand that debasing women in serious circumstances by making sexual references is ignorant at best. But is that what’s going on here?
This woman is a model. She’s not an electronics manufacturer working for Asus. The only reason she is here is because she is attractive and has nice body features. No doubt she is happy that guys like to look at her- it’s her livelihood. It’s not easy to make money yet she is doing it with a simple smile, but here it is taboo to mention this explicitly? If it’s not offensive to pay a pretty girl to attract male attention to your booth then what is offensive about the natural result?
I will forever be in awe at the depths that PC speech has infested society. Asus quickly and predictably removed the tweet and apologized. That’s too bad, because I’m waiting for the day that someone tells it like it is.
After just recently releasing a kick-ass EP, Silversun Pickups finally drops their next full length studio album. Will the group continue the trend of adding distortion and noise to a mostly homogenous collection? Although that’s a horrible summation of the direction of Swoon, which is admittedly a great album, the criticism is still fair. Silversun is a group, however, that has a lot more to share than a single trick, and even though Seasick hinted at some good things, it didn’t prepare me for Neck of the Woods.
Brave diversity is a concise description of the collection of tracks. As the album first starts, I actually thought I was listening to new Sigur Ros. Within moments it sounded like the recent Portishead effort. How a band can pull off representing so many influences at once is remarkable. Depeche Mode, She Wants Revenge, My Bloody Valentine- I shit you not, sequences of songs sound like all of these groups.
Busy Bees
Busy Bees
All this variety is immediately confusing- the music is different and although some songs have catchy sections, the expectations of where the music is going keep changing. Inconsistent beats, notes, and melodies will require more listening to than the group’s previous work but high notes and powerful surges excite, making familiarity with the songs and the lyrics elevate the experience. Neck of the Woods is definitely more indie. The songs have less standard pop structures and more changeups and strong melodic dissonances. But the sounds are purposeful with great builds to rocking sections.
Besides the non-conformist song structures, Silversun is adding some other twists to this cocktail. Some tracks are more synth driven at times, especially in their intros. The band thankfully plays with much less distortion. Many of the vocals are simultaneously backed up by the female bassist giving a magical quality to the harmony. Everything here screams love of music and discontent with doing the same thing again and again, and after all, isn’t that kind of what ‘more indie’ is all about?
Out Of Breath
Out of Breath
My recommendation on Neck of the Woods should be clear. This is a landmark album by the Silversun Pickups. This is a snapshot moment of the band maturing into something more than just a signature sound. This is a headphone record. Put those on, turn the volume up, and just enjoy the variety and pacing of the entire album without interruption. It all fits together so well that it will amaze you at how enthralling an experience it can be.
Greg Dulli, front man for the influential 90s indie rock group The Afghan Whigs, has had a pretty good post breakup career with The Twilight Singers, The Gutter Twins, and solo. He plays lots of small shows in Los Angeles and I try to go to as many of them as I can. His live performances are famous- he always surprises with a cover, he’s as smooth as any jazz man with a smoke and a drink on his mic stand, and he likes to interact with the crowd. At one small Twilight Singers show in Glendale several years ago, he asked the crowd for any requests, and I yelled out, “MILEZ IS DEAD!”. He laughed for a moment and said, “That one will have to wait for an Afghan Whigs reunion.”
I took it as a joke.
See And Don’t See
See and Don’t See
THE AFGHAN WHIGS RELEASE FIRST NEW TRACK IN FIVE YEARS. So says the news section of theafghanwhigs.com, in all caps to stress the importance of the event. The next news item below it? THE AFGHAN WHIGS ANNOUNCE LOCATION OF FIRST SHOW IN 13 YEARS.
Long story short, Greg Dulli hooked up with his old bandmates for a good old fashioned reunion. There’s no new album announced yet, however, and the tour dates are mostly big shows like Spain’s Primavera Sound and Lollapalooza in Chicago, with many being outside the States. So for now you are stuck with this 1970s cover.
There are no tour dates scheduled in Los Angeles just yet but I can’t believe the man will let down a fanbase that has applauded him all along. And when that time comes, I’ll be there, and I’ll be expecting Greg Dulli to keep his promise and play my request.
The Escapist was a site that I used to respect. It was video game commentary for adults. Perhaps it was always a bit highbrow but there was enough meat in the philosophizing to give it purpose. Nowadays the site has evolved into a video channel, more or less, with articles and related “news”. While some might bemoan the change, it does fit in with a more modern internet and I can’t really blame the shift.
These days, however, The Escapist is starting to employ link bait techniques. That is, using sensationalist headlines that overblow anything the article actually talks about solely for the purpose of attracting attention.
"Games Aren’t Good For Adults" claims a news link. Clicking through quickly reveals the true headline to be "Games Aren’t Good Enough For Adults", which means something completely different.
Or what about the “Avengers Cost NYC $160 Billion in Damages" story, where reading the article explains that this is the amount of money that a real life execution of the fantasy plot would actually cost the city.
Is the website hurting that much for ad revenue? Please treat us like adults. Right now the headlines are going the way of Yahoo!.
For a bit of background, let me explain that I am a Generation X internet user. This means at one point I used Yahoo! as my main hub for searches. I am a pretty brand loyal type of guy, and while others were moving on to the newfangled Google, I stayed true to the old guard. Did it matter that the new upstart was sleek and clean and didn’t have a page littered with services? Sure, that’s a big deal, but I wasn’t naïve in thinking that Google would never build into the same type of thing. In point of fact, simple searches are often beleaguered with pandering to join Google+ or the like these days. But that’s not why I left Yahoo! years ago.
This is old Yahoo!. You can see the queue of news stories below. All of these have legitimate reporting value. The lead story, however, is a bit curious. Look at that picture of meteors. A dazzling meteor shower “could send up to 200 meteors per hour streaking across the sky.” Cool! Wait a minute- 200 per hour? What is that, about 3 meteors a minute? Isn’t that an awfully deceptive image for 1 meteor every 20 seconds?
Up next is this investigative gem. A 40-yard dash time “is too good for one blogger to believe.” What? This is a “news” story about a blog that takes offense at something? That’s like the AP running an expose and linking to my site because I said Ghost Hunting Shows were stupid. There is no journalistic value to that at all.
Up next in Yahoo!’s cutting edge repertoire: a funny animal video. Ok, these light-hearted distractions will always find a way to people’s eyes. Let’s see what the once giant search engine headlines for the “Best videos of ‘09”. A deer walking through a cat door. Except that this video looks awfully familiar, and the timestamp of 1999 is a dead giveaway that this video is REALLY OLD. It was probably first seen on America’s Funniest Home Videos. How is this a best of video for 2009 exactly?
It’s obvious at this point that Yahoo! is scrambling for page views. They don’t have any content so they are referring to opinion blogs and videos from last century to stay afloat. But what happens when even that isn’t enough? Will they just flat out make up facts? This Ke$ha headline explicitly states that she has “the most downloaded track by a female artist ever.” That is a pretty bold claim. Ever? Man, that is unbelievable. I mean, really, super surprising. Let me just read about that.
Oh, I see. The reason I didn’t believe this fact is because is was completely untrue. The song wasn’t the most downloaded track by a female artist ever, it just had the highest weekly sum. That’s impressive for sure, but why the need to lie? Yes, you fooled me again Yahoo!. You got another link click. You know what I got? A new search engine. And that’s when I started using Google.
So back to The Escapist and the internet in general. This kind of link baiting is a desperation move, a last ditch ploy to keep traffic up. What it most certainly is not is a viable long term strategy for providing readers with good content. One thing people seem to have forgotten these days is that respect is hard to gain but easy to lose. Selling it off for a few more years of profit may help the bottom line today but it does significant damage to an ailing brand down the road.
Speaking of which, it’s almost time to find a new, improved, better search engine. Anyone have suggestions?