Girl in a Cage

Stuff I Liked This Summer

While in general I'm quite pleased with my contrarian pose, there are times when it comes back to bite me in the ass. So yesterday we were meeting people in the library, and they were really late, so I went to the graphic novel section to find something to kill time with. Because I figured I wasn't going to read an entire book in half an hour or whatever. At first I thought I'd pick up one of the manga books, because that's a phenomenon I don't get at all, but they only had episode 16 in a series, and I wasn't willing to work hard enough to try to figure out what's going on in a series I know nothing about. Finally I settled on Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.
I had resisted picking this up in the past because of my contrarian pose. Because people who would never otherwise pick up a comic book will pick up a comic book if the New York Times tells them it's a graphic novel. Which has nothing to do with me. Like I said, the whole contrarian pose is pretty dumb sometimes. But I do get a kick out of saying, "No, I haven't read In the Shadow of No Towers, but Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil kicks total ass!"

Anyway, back to Fun Home. This book completely knocked me on my ass. It's just fantastic: funny and moving and profoundly sad and completely riveting. Go read it.

Daughter #1 and I watched and enjoyed Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior on the Disney Channel.
This featured Brenda Song from The Suite Life, here playing a less irritating character than she does on that show. She's a bubble-headed Chinese American high school student who discovers that she's the reincarnation of a mythical Chinese warrior and has to fight evil instead of becoming Homecoming Queen. It was cheesy and predictable and I liked it anyway. Lots of wire fighting, a little Shaolin Soccer, and a positive message about appreciating your cultural heritage. Also there were terra cotta warriors coming to life and being posessed by evil spirits.

I read Carolyn Parkhurst's Lost and Found and really enjoyed it. It's a novel about an Amazing Race-style reality show. It's my favorite kind of book--fast-paced and readable with some real depth. I like it when you can get wrapped up in a page-turner and not hate yourself for it. My only quibble is with the cover.
The paperback cover makes this look like the kind of book that will suck all the testosterone out of your body if you so much as pick it up, when in fact, this is really a kind of adventure novel. It's a given in publishing that men don't read, so everything has to look especially female friendly. So they put a mom and daughter frolicking on the beach on the cover of this book that men would actually like, thus assuring that men won't pick it up. Thus proving that men don't read.

Rufus Has the Package!

Transcript of an actual conversation that took place this morning while my lovely wife was trying to get ready to go to some heinous meeting.

Me: You know what I don't get?

My Lovely Wife: No. What.

Me: How the hell is it that Sylvester didn't know about Tina and Roxanne? I mean, Twan spends three years in jail, and Sylvester doesn't know why?

MLW: But even Twan didn't know that it was Roxanne who gave him up.

Me: But he knew who was in the car with him! I just think Sylvester should have...

MLW: Agh! Why the hell are we even talking about this?! I'm gonna be late!

Yes, for some reason she preferred maintaining gainful employment to staying home and hashing over all the twists and turns of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet.
As for me, I've been thinking about it all day. We watched the whole thing over the course of a couple of days over at www.ifc.com, and I'm kinda obsessed.

But more than that, I'm impressed. I mean, this whole thing--I guess you'd call it an R&B recitative soap opera/music video--is kind of a creative tour de force. And it's hilarious besides. (Did he intend it to be hilarious? While I guess that was initially unclear, I think it's pretty clear after viewing chapters 13-22 that yeah, he gets that this is a comedy.)

R Kelly is, of course, a dirtbag, which I do have to say kind of complicates my reaction to his work. I guess people are complicated, and you have to take art on its own merits and not judge it based on whether the artist is a nice guy, or in this case, a guy with a penchant for videotaping sex acts with underage girls.

In any case, Trapped in the Closet is top-notch popular entertainment, and what's kind of thrilling about it is that it is unlike anything anybody else is doing right now. I mean, sure, there are soap operas and there are crime dramas and there are comedies and there are R&B songs, but Trapped in the Closet is the only thing I've ever seen that is all of those.

It's just so rare that you come across any work of art and go, "Well, nobody else is doing anything quite like this right now." I remember thinking that the first time I heard Run-DMC's "Rock Box", though of course now it's hard to believe that mixing rap and rock was ever novel or not crappy. Maybe in 20 years, R&B's equivalent of Linkin Park will be releasing shitty cliffhanger serial videos all the time. But right now it's still new and cool.

R Kelly's trial on child pornography charges starts next month. Unless he's got new episodes already in the can, it may be a while before we get any more chapters. I suppose it's possible that we may never find out the significance of Rufus having the package. But still, we can always walk around singing to ourselves, "The midget is the baby's daddy!" or, my personal favorite, "you must be crazier than a fish with titties."

Hard Rock Hallelujah: My Day At Ozzfest

Sunday I spent seven hours in a minivan driving from New Jersey to Boston. Monday I spent seven hours at Ozzfest 2007. My seven hours at Ozzfest were definitely more enjoyable, but it was a close thing at some points.

The boy, as I've mentioned before, is a big Ozzy fan, and what with tickets being free this year and all, I figured, well, what the hell. What could possibly be a better spot for some family-friendly father-son bonding than an all-day metal fest?

Well, there were three corporate sponsors, and only one sells a product the boy is legally permitted to purchase. And that was Monster Energy Drinks, and I would probably give him a shot of Jagermeister--another sponsor-- before I would give him that much caffeine. The third sponsor was Hustler. Hardcore since '74. They were giving out DVDs at one point. The boy and I are both big fans of free stuff, but we avoided that particular giveaway.

We arrived close to 4 o'clock, only to find that we'd missed the band I was most excited about seeing--Cthonic, a Taiwanese band that features a traditional Chinese instrument and apparently sings about Taiwanese independence. (For reasons comprehensible only to the Chinese government, it's perfectly fine if the Taiwanese government asserts, as it did when I lived there, that it is the rightful government of all of China, but it's an affront punishable by annihilation if the Taiwanese government asserts that it is the government of a country separate from Mainland China, which, um, it is.)

So some crap Polish band called Behemoth was playing, and we wandered around looking at the people, the varieties of merch for sale, (a booth occupied by the Vagina clothing company was a crowd favorite.) and the people standing in long lines to meet the bands. For all my complaints about metal, and there are a bunch coming, I have to say this for the Ozzfest--it was free, and, with the exception of the Ozzman himself, you could meet and get an autograph from pretty much any performer you wanted. I have never seen this kind of access and fan respect in a venue this size before, and I have to give the organizers and performers a lot of credit for it. Another thing--I have also never been to a music festival where the load outs, load ins and sound checks were accomplished so quickly and efficiently. Normally you don't notice the roadies except when you see a fat guy in a satin jacket with a bunch of badges on lanyards around his neck, but this crew was a model of efficiency and professionalism that every road crew should strive to emulate. Again, I felt like it showed a lot of respect for the fans--we were there to hear music (or, in most cases, something approximating music), and they made sure they delivered the product without a lot of waiting. Everybody hit the stage at exactly the posted time, which is kind of miraculous in a rock and roll show.

Okay, now for my complaints. Over there at the second stage, the MC was some meathead guy who filled the interval between bands by saying "Get up on your boyfriend's shoulders and show us your tits! Yeah, nice ones! Why don't you go give that other girl a kiss!" etc. Yeah, the sexism was bad, but the stupidity was I think even worse. And I felt a particular responsibility hauling an eleven-year-old boy through this thing. Not because I think the sight of drunken breasts is going to ruin his mind (he was too short to get a glimpse of the above-shoulder proceedings, as, it should be pointed out, was I) , but rather because I don't want him adopting the sexist idiocy going on there. Yeah, I know, I brought him to a metal show, what the hell did I expect. Well, I have to say the whole thing probably would have been appalling even if I had been there on my own.

And then there was the music, which was the ostensible reason for the show. We caught a couple of songs by Hatebreed--the boy was bored and wanted to go stake out a lawn seat. Fine by me. Now let me say as to what's going on in metal today that I have heard from metal's defenders about the scene, and the release of aggression, and this kind of stuff, and it echoes a lot of what people said about punk in the 80's, so I went in with an open mind when Hatebreed, Static X, and Lamb of God played. I tried, people, but this music is just shit. Partly there's the fact that melody has been completely dispensed with, so what you're left with is rhythmic pummeling of the guitars with vocals growled or screamed amelodically over the whole thing.

What strikes me as ironic is that the scene seems to revolve around a rejection of society's norms--it seems to be about rebelling against the idiotic conformity of school, church, and work, and yet the music follows such rigid rules. It may be that Hatebreed, Static X, and Lamb of God represent different subgenres of metal, but they basically all followed the same rules--no melody allowed, identical crunchy guitar sounds played in a variety of prescribed rhythms, and any solos must be of the high-speed, way up on the neck deedly-deedly-deedly variety, and again, the lead guitar has a prescribed sound. It was just so boring, and, worse than that, joyless. It's all about deadly serious head banging and moshing, and don't anybody crack a smile, except between songs, when you're bellowing at the crowd about the joys of being drunk or high.

Hatebreed's vocalist said at the end of their set that the music saved his life, and that it kept him away from doing a lot of bad stuff. Given that the day appeared to be dedicated to the disrespect of women, the abuse of alcohol and marijuana, and violence (we saw four fights, one in the french fry line.), I had to wonder exactly what the music kept this guy away from. Heroin and murder, perhaps.

I just felt like there was a fascist undertone to much of this music. Follow the rules! React in prescribed ways to our joyless, regimented rock! Bow down before our cool logo projected on the giant scrim behind us! (Static X played in front of a giant skull with cutlery sticking out of it projected on a giant scrim, and it looked cool as hell but somehow made me think of the Nuremburg rallies.)

Having said that, watching sweaty drunken shirtless men mosh to these bands was the single gayest thing I have ever seen. And I watch Project Runway.

Okay. On to the music that didn't inherently suck. Black Tide opened the main stage with a set of competent, melodic, 70's-style metal. The boy and I both liked them; the rest of the crowd was indifferent. Oz himself...well, the man is still a good performer, and his musicians are very talented. This may or may not be due to the throat infection Oz claimed to have, but he simply cannot sing. He opened with "Bark at the Moon," and while, on the one hand, it was an incredible relief to hear actual songs after two hours of being grunted at by Static X and Lamb of God, the boy and I still spent most of the song wincing as Ozzy reached for notes that simply weren't there and ended up flat or off-key. This happened throughout the night; in marked contrast to the professionalism of the road crew, Ozzy's vocals were strictly amateur hour. He would have been booed off the stage on a Monday night in a club with this kind of crap. Still, the boy and I can now say we've seen Ozzy, even if seeing Ozzy now is like when I saw Sinatra in '87--yes, it's the same human being, and he knows how to work a crowd, but the magic is gone because he just can't sing anymore. Ozzy's set came to a screeching halt at the end of "Suicide Solution" when guitarist Zakk Wilde spent five minutes playing with himself. Sorry, I meant playing by himself. I mean, what's the point of a five-minute ersatz "Eruption" ending with "The Star Spangled Banner"? I mean, the guy can obviously play, but his best solos of the night were note-for-note renditions of Randy Rhodes solos, and his big showcase was a Hendrix cover. Yippee.

I've saved the best for last, even though the organizers didn't see fit to do the same. The day was saved by the demented Finnish genius of Lordi. I think this might be my new favorite band. They performed in latex monster masks and played a gloriously melodic brand of 80's-style hair metal. And they put on a fantastic performance. The costumes, the graveyard set--fantastic. The pyrotechnics on nearly every song--also fantastic. (They had pyrotechnics on the guitar and drumsticks too!) The chainsaw--loved it. The skull with smoke pouring out--likewise. The gigantic KISS boots on the lead singer, and the bat wings that sprouted from his back--O, it was all glorious. I just loved everything about this band. They closed with "Hard Rock Hallelujah," which was the winner of the 2006 Eurovision Song contest. (To the uninitiated, this contest is about the least cool thing in the world--the only previous winner you've ever heard of is ABBA. The fact that they even entered something so dorkified it makes American Idol look edgy is definitely a "so uncool it's incredibly cool" move.) I also liked "Deadite Girls Gone Wild." Ah, you ask, but a band with horror-movie personas and props must take a position on Satan--what's Lordi's? Well, I have to say it's confused. On the one hand, they gave us "Who's Your Daddy?" ("Satan's your daddy!") but on the other hand, they also gave us "Devil is a Loser" ("He's my bitch!"). How can you possibly not love a band fronted by a man who asserts that the devil is his bitch? (I think this was the number where the giant bat wings came out.) Well, I suppose you can not love them if you are there to see one of the rule-followers. The Static X and Lamb of God fans were downright hostile to Lordi because they were true rock and roll rebels, breakin' the rules. It was funny--some of the hostility seemed to come from the fact that they were wearing costumes, but then Static X came out, and their vocalist was also in a costume of sorts. Well, judge for yourself.

Fist-pumping, sing-along choruses, props, pyro, it was all glorious rock and roll showmanship, and the fact that it was so offensive to the fans of the shitty bands that followed made it all that much sweeter.

I read something to the effect that the bands aren't getting paid for this tour, so everybody's pretty much doing it for merch money and exposure. Given that Lordi probably spent tens of thousands of dollars on pyrotechnics in order to put on a beautiful rock and roll spectacle, I'm rewarding them by downloading the CD The Arockalypse if I ever finish this freaking entry.

Lead singer--yes, he actually sang--Mr. Lordi asked from the stage during one song, "Would You Love a Monsterman?" My answer is an unequivocal yes.

And now, you, too can love a monsterman. Check out Lordi's fabulous website and enjoy this video, featuring Lordi in all their glory as well as some zombie cheerleaders.

The Ruins

Okay, so I finished The Ruins by Scott Smith, and in many respects, it's a kick-ass book. It's really like a 500-page short story rather than a novel, and I mean that as a compliment. It's relentless, and the plot just chugs along constantly. It's a very effective suspense novel that kept me turning pages feverishly. I did find the exposition in the beginning a bit clunky, and until some key injuries, it was kind of hard to tell the main characters apart. It was pretty far into the novel before I had a sense of the characters as real people. He seems very distanced from them in the beginning of the book, and he throws a lot of information at the reader instead of showing us who the characters are. But, for all that, it's a tremendously effective nail-biter of a book.

And now, the spoilers. No, really. I'm writing about the end here. Don't read this part if you don't want the end spoiled.

Okay, having said that, this movie has the same problem that seems to be plaguing the horror genre in all its manifestations-- here's a bunch of people put into a deadly situation...and they all die! Sure enough, that death that seemed inevitable on page 60 turns out to really be inevitable. I mean, what the hell's the point? And, in this case, it just seems particularly cynical, because rather than showing any of the characters going out looking at all brave or resourceful, we just see them being petty and stupid--put to the ultimate test, they all end up being pretty contemptible. Ugh. And, I mean, they had 3 bottles of tequila and nobody thought to try to set the vine on fire? They just never seem to even contemplate fighting the vine as an option, which made for pretty dreary reading after a while.

I still recommend this book, but geez, we seem to be living in dark times. All the horror purveyors can give us is surrender to inevitable doom. Can't somebody fight back already?

Summer Reading

Picked up Charlie Huston's No Dominion, a sequel to Already Dead. This guy is just so freaking talented I can't stand it. It's a vampire novel! It's a crime novel! No, it's both, and better than anybody else is doing in either genre right now. Most of the time when I read a pulpy noir novel, I feel like I need a shower and a nice palate-cleanser of a novel to get the stench of nihilism off me, but when I finished No Dominion, I totally didn't want it to end. If you have any interest in vampires or crime novels, you need to be reading this guy's work.

For one dollar, I picked up a copy of the "uninhibited" stewardess memoir Coffee, Tea, or Me. It was originally published in 1967, and let me just say what passed for uninhibited in 1967 is really quite tame today. Basically it's the idea that women find sex pleasurable. Oooh, naughty! All I wanted out of this was a cheesy beach read, and it pretty much failed to deliver. Then there's the whole chapter about how the "normal" passengers are understandably upset when they have to sit next to someone "faggy." Then there are the numerous chapters padded with lists as the ghostwriter stretches for his contractual word count.

Still, there was something interesting--I have the 2003 edition, with an introduction where the ghostwriter makes no bones about the fact that he took a couple of anecdotes from a pair of stewardesses and padded them out with some of his own airplane experiences and his imagination to create this "memoir." So I guess the whole fictionalized memoir wasn't invented by James Frey. And, ultimately, who was harmed? Coffee Tea or Me was a bestseller that provided hours of entertainment to a lot of people who thought it was a memoir. So, ultimately, it delivered on its promise of entertainment (at least in 1967--as I said above, it's a bit of a snoozer these days), and the fact that much of it was invented by a ghostwriter doesn't seem like a big scandal.

I'm about halfway through Scott Smith's The Ruins, but I don't want to say anything about it yet,because I still feel stupid for raving about The Historian before I'd finished it and found out it completely falls apart in the last third. Well, okay. I'll say so far so good and leave it at that.

O, The Glory of the 60's.

The whole family went to see Hairspray the other day. I'm always annoyed by movie reviews that compare the movie in question to a book or another movie, because that's ultimately irrelevant. The only question is whether the movie at hand is worth seeing. In this case, the answer is yes. I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would--the music is good, the script is witty, the performances are (mostly) good, and a good time was had by all. Even though John Travolta looked creepy as hell--there's just no disguising his enormous cube of a head, and for that reason he doesn't really make a credible woman--he was actually acting and turned in a pretty good performance. (As all the movies I've seen this summer begin to run together in my mind, I sat there wondering if maybe John Travolta's head was actually the All Spark, and I was wondering if Shia LeBoeuf was going to wander in and rip off Travolta's head and press it into Megatron's chest and blow him up. It didn't happen. But that would be cool.)

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's compare this to the original and enumerate the ways in which it is wanting. I guess my biggest problem with the new movie is the whole Tracey/Link romance. In the original movie, it's completely credible that Link falls for Tracey, because she's naughty and fabulous and a great dancer, and they hook up early on and spend the rest of the movie making out like typical horny teens. In the new movie, though, Tracey is just perky. I mean, Ricki Lake was perky too, but there was other stuff going on, whereas now, it's all about the perkiness. They also don't make it clear that she's a great dancer, and her naughtiness is all political and not sexual, and so it's hard to see why Link likes her. This is also because Zac Efron does a credible imitation of a block of wood for most of the movie. So it's hard to tell if the filmmakers intentionally neutered the romance, or if that just happened because Zac Efron can't convey infatuation/horniness on screen. It's funny, because the Penny/Seaweed romance is credible and horny, and they get lots of wet kisses on screen, whereas Tracey and Link only get a couple of relatively chaste kisses at the very end. I think it probably says something about where we are as a culture that the interracial romance is presented realistically, and the fat/skinny romance is completely de-sexualized. It's like they think America isn't ready for it or something. Weird.

Alert--while at Hairspray, we saw a preview for Across the Universe, which is yet another in a long series of masturbatory baby boom nostalgia pics. Oh, we were carefree and innocent, and then the war came and took away our national innocence. As I've said before, other people's nostalgia is inherently annoying, and this is no exception. I just think it's time for the baby boom to get over the 60's already. You can say this about coming of age in the 80's--those of us who did aren't going to torment all the generations that follow us with phoney nostalgia about how our teenage decade was so wonderful and important. It's just like, yeah, there were leg warmers and neon socks, great teen movies and great postpunk, and then we all FREAKING GREW UP AND GOT LIVES! Ahem. Oh, did I mention that the Across the Universe movie apparently features lots and lots of horrible versions of Beatles songs? Oh, Gawd, if there was any way to make the whole movie about the glorious 60's worse, it's to have 20something actors doing their crap renditions of Beatles songs. I can't help thinking if Michael Jackson could only keep his freaking hands to himself, he wouldn't need to pimp out the Beatles catalog to anybody who shows up at his house with cash.

My pitch

So I just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was fan-freakin' tastic. Just amazing. I finished and immediately read all kinds of stuff about it and quickly concluded that I had nothing to add to the conversation. It's a wonderful book and I'm still kind of in mourning.

And then I thought, what do we in the US of A do when one of our favorite series ends? Spinoff! Here's the pitch--Malfoy, having been taken down a peg or two, what with the defeat of the dark lord and familial disgrace and all, decides to leave the UK for some fun in the sun in college in sunny Southern California. And who should wind up as his roommate but Nickelodeon's Josh Peck!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Draco and Josh!

Think of the comedic possibilities--I like to think about the unlikely pair getting out of a wacky scrape, possibly caused by Draco's evil or Josh's idiocy. Josh bellows, "Hug Me, Roomie!" and Draco responds with "Crucio!" See Josh do his Fred Gwynne imitation as he twitches in the agony of the cruciatus curse! As the episodes go by, their mutual suspicion and/or hatred will turn to begrudging affection. I see a big sitcom audience "awwww" moment when Draco finally gives Josh the hug he's been craving.

Viacom! Jo Rowling! Josh Peck! Call me! Let's get this done!

Free...To Rollerskate!

As someone who makes his living through copyrights, I am sorta ambivalent about YouTube. I mean, I like the fact that you can find just about anything any time you want it. But, at the same time, I do think people should get paid for their work. Let me just say if it were ever to happen that several million people viewed a clip of something I was involved in creating, I would certainly want to get paid.

But what if the holders of the copyright aren't serving the public demand? Yes, I am back on the Get a Life hobby horse. You can probably still track down the couple of Rhino DVDs and see "The Prettiest Week of My Life" and "S.P.E.W.Y. and Me" (I think this one is the second best episode of the entire series, after the time-travel one. Well, also maybe the one where Chris feeds Gus and Sharon tainted shellfish and gets them to dance the Alleycat for hours until they come to their senses and rip his head off and play soccer with it. That's a good one too.), but where the hell are my complete season DVDs? Did you know you can buy complete seasons of Gimme a Break, Simon and Simon, and even Riptide? I mean, Riptide! The series whose slogan was "That show that comes on after the A Team!" And yet no Get a Life.

But anyway, I've longed for a taste of "Zoo Animals on Wheels" for years, and it's finally surfaced on YouTube in all its glory. I would be willing to pay to watch this, but the copyright holder is unwilling to sell it to me. Though I guess there's some specious moral reasoning going on here, I feel like it's therefore okay for me to watch it for free. And not just me--now you can watch it too! Enjoy!