Girl in a Cage

Who's House?

I know that writing about cool things my kids have done is right up there with writing about how a nation lost its innocence in the 60's or how baseball or fly fishing brought me and my taciturn old man together on the list of the annoying things to write about, but here goes.

So the kids are getting ready for school this morning, and just out of the blue, as he's walking around looking for his homework, the boy busts out with,
"I'm the king of rock! There is none higher! Sucka MC's should call me" and he stops rapping but continues searching for homework, and both girls, who are also busy with their pre-school preparations, bust out with, "sire!"

Boy: "To burn my kingdom, you must use"
Girls: "Fire!"
Boy: "And I won't stop rockin' till I"
Girls: "Retire!"

It ended there, and everyone went back to their business as though nothing exceptional had happened. This is what made it extra cool to my way of thinking--I guess their mindset is, on any given morning, I might be called upon to spontaneously perform a RUN-DMC song in their call-and-response style, so I guess I just need to be ready.

Truly, they are the king and queens of rock.

Stuff I Don't Get

--"I Can Haz Cheezeburger?" So people send in pictures of cats with dumb captions in some kind of strange English-based creole. Maybe you have to like cats to get this. And, given that there is no shortage of dogs in the world, why you would like cats is beyond me. Perhaps because they rarely strew garbage all over your house and crap on the floor during thunderstorms.

--Spencer, Heidi, and their ilk. Why the hell are these people on the cover of People or Us every other week? I mean, yeah, they're on a reality show, but who isn't? Seriously, if I was on a reality show (admittedly, the most boring reality show ever on a channel no one watches, but still), then surely everyone in America has been on a reality show, and it can't possibly be a qualification for stardom. As near as I can tell, these people are so vapid and dull they make Paris and Nicole look interesting. I mean, did all the real celebrities die when I wasn't looking or something?

--"Christian pop punk". Listening to Pandora the other day, I'd made a channel based on Cheap Trick's "Surrender", and it kicked out a song by Relient K. "Hey," thought I, "Sounds like a second-rate Fountains of Wayne! Wait, that guy's talking about sin like it's a bad thing! Are you sure this is a rock and roll song?" Well, I'm still not sure, but clicking on the band's name revealed that they are not the only
"Christian Pop Punk" outfit. My feeling is that anybody who writes a song with the line "Marilyn Manson Ate My Girlfriend" who doesn't intend it to be dirty has no business being a musician.

--Linkedin. I guess if you were looking for a job it would be okay, and I found a couple of my college roommates on it, but overall it's like myspace or facebook without the voyeurism/exhibitionism or time-wasting games. What the hell is the point?

--The thirty percent of Americans who think Bush is doing a good job. What do you imagine they think a bad presidency looks like?

--Sex and the City. But, you know, I'm male.

--Radiohead. So, okay, they put out a couple of "difficult" albums, so then people who are into them can feel superior to people who prefer their music listenable. I get how that kind of move gains you a small, dedicated cult following: Captain Beefheart and the Residents built careers on the same gambit, but how this move gains you a large, vociferous, and very annoying cult is mysterious to me.

--NASCAR. I know, this is the acid test of whether you are a cultural elitist or not, but I really do not understand this at all. The cars go around and around and around until they stop. You read fans talking about how the drivers are "wholesome" and "role models," which I strongly suspect is code for "white," so maybe that's it.

--Suffering. King Lear offers this take: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." That's a bit nihilistic for my taste, but, then again, nobody else has come up with an explanation that makes any sense at all.

On a More Serious Note

I hesitate to even mention this in the same blog where I write about crap like Miss Rap Supreme, but this article is seriously one of the best things I've ever read. If you know someone who's been raped, and, unless you're accessing this blog from your solitary hermitage, you do, you really should read it. It completely blew me away.

Melniboned

I recently bought Elric: The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock and am reading it. I'm not normally a huge fantasy reader, though I admit to a fondness for the odd Conan story and comic book, but these particular tales came highly recommended by a bunch of geeks I knew in the 8th grade, some of whom are now fancy novel-readin', New-Yorker-Subscribin', Whole-Foods-Shoppin', look-down-their-nose-at-genre-fiction types. (Not mentioning any names, mind you.) (I also subscribe to the New Yorker and would shop at Whole Foods if they carried the crap my kids like to eat, so my taunt is tinged with hypocrisy)

Well, look, I love nothing more than trumpeting the virtues of this or that genre over literary fiction (which is also genre fiction of course, but "literary fiction" sounds so much better than "fiction about whiny bitches who can't bring themselves to write their novels"), but I don't think I can do it in this case.

Because this genre mostly sucks. Well, there are conventions of the genre that I have a hard time getting around, chiefly the highfalutin prose style and silly names, but even if you can get past those, there are problems. I mean, these Elric stories are apparently classics of the genre, and while there are some interesting ideas, they mostly follow the Conan formula of Problem, Intense Bloodletting, and Resolution, which is fine for a few stories but starts to get tiresome after a while. Many of the early Elric stories contain particularly egregious deus ex machina endings in which Elric, in a tight spot, calls out to his patron demon who pulls his bacon out of the fire just enough to allow Elric to engage in more bloodletting.

Okay, I do enjoy the bloodletting. But then we get to the four interlinked novellas, or novelettes, or something, in which Elric has to fight with his Chaos-forged weapons against the very forces of Chaos itself, including the aforementioned patron demon! All of which is dull and kind of difficult to understand. I mean, the guy accidentally kills the love of his life--this I get. The guy travels to alternate planes where dwarf messengers of the Lords of Law lead him to kill iterations of the eternal hero so he can bring the magical object back to his own plane and fight the forces of Chaos that have already destroyed the world except for the wreckage of Melnibone--well, I stopped caring about when we got to "dwarf messengers of the Lords of Law".

I'm stubborn and nearly finished, so I'm going to plow through even though I've kinda lost interest, but I don't think I'll be picking up any more volumes.

Thanks, Boomers!

Well, I've given the baby boom (i.e., The Most Narcissistic Generation) a fair amount of grief over the years for the pop culture hegemony they inflicted on those of us who came after them. The Grateful Dead, phony nostalgia for a 60's that never existed, one insufferable Vietnam War movie after another, keeping most post-Skynyrd rock and roll off the airwaves until 1991--well, their pop cultural crimes are legion.

But I have two things to thank them for.

The first is that their participation in the disaster that was the Vietnam War kept me and my age cohort out of the jungles of Central America in the 80's. Reagan would have loved nothing better than to send a bunch of young men down there to overthrow the Sandinistas or prop up some evil puppet dictatorship. But of course he couldn't do that because baby boomers were putting out maudlin, self-indulgent Vietnam War movies every 20 minutes, thus reminding America that maybe sending a bunch of young men into a jungle to fight against an idea was pretty crappy foreign policy. Thus did we break the "1 war per generation" cycle that the US seemed to be in up till then. (Now, of course, we're in another ill-conceived war, at least partly because my generation isn't making a lot of anti-war movies. And, as the song goes, the big wheel keep on turnin.)

The second, and far more trivial point is that as the boomers took over the movie industry, their self-infatuation and nostalgic yearning for their lost youth gave rise to the golden age of teen movies. We just watched The Karate Kid, which is really top-notch, and there were, of course, all the John Hughes movies, which are problematic but occasionally great, Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, which are both fantastic, and many, many more.

(Aside--I was going to write about how Vince Van Patten was such a great bad guy in all those teen movies, but it turns out not only was he not the bad guy in the Karate Kid, he actually wasn't the bad guy in any teen movie. How could I remember so wrong? Anyway, heartfelt thanks to the sneering blond rich boys in all the 80's teen movies did a fantastic job.)

So, anyway, thanks to those wacky baby boomers who kept me out of the jungle and gave us the greatest teen movies ever during the time when I happened to be a teen.

Free Music Alert

Head on over to www.fallingaugust.com and download some free tunes from the early 90's. Why? Why the hell not? They're free! You can also browse the bios of the band members and read fan appreciations by fully one-third of the band's fan base, i.e. me and some other guy.

Studios Need Me on Retainer

Indiana Jones opens today (and I'm not there! O, the pain!), so, before it disappears completely, I thought I'd weigh in with my opinion as to why Prince Caspian fell short of domestic box office expectations.

Really, I could have saved everybody a ton of cash and trouble years ago. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is a beloved classic. A beloved, self-contained classic, I might add. The Narnia books don't lend themselve to franchise-dom, though, because you can't follow characters through the whole series, so all you have is the magic of Narnia, which, let's just be honest here, C.S. Lewis didn't really have the chops to create an alternate world compelling enough to visit multiple times.

Also, the rest of the Narnia books bloooooooowwwww. I read them all and just barely remember there was something cool in The Silver Chair with a labyrinth or something, and there were magic rings in The Magician's Nephew. That's it.

Not surprising, I guess, given C.S. Lewis's deficiencies as a fantasy writer (He was also a horrible science fiction writer but apparently quite a good Christian aplogist, which I can't speak to since I didn't read any of those) and also considering if you set out to write some sneaky Christian allegory and lead with the religion's money shot, the crucifixion and resurrection, well, that just doesn't leave you much good material to work with. So you start with a really cool, magical book and then lead into a bunch of stilted, dull-as-dishwater sequels.

Daughter #1 and I attempted to read The Horse and His Boy a while back. "Do we have to read this?" she said, "It's sooooo boring!"

"It certainly is," I replied, and placed it back on the shelf where it remains to this day.

So Prince Caspian made a bunch of cash, but less than the first one. But they'll probably make another one, and it will make about twenty bucks, and they'll abandon the whole enterprise long before they get to The Last Battle.

White Moron Rise

So I've heard a couple of Danzig songs I liked: "Mother" and "Twist of Cain". I was thinking about downloading some because I've been feeling the urge to rock.

But then I made the mistake of reading up on ol' Glen. And I came across this thing about a song on the B-sides compilation called "White Devil Rise". Sigh. Apparently this is Glen's thoughtful response to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam's whole "white man is the devil" thing. (Timely! The NOI has been spoutin' that stuff for at least 50 years! Way to be topical, Glen!)

Now, I've been known to pop off and say something stupid to piss off someone who annoys me, so I can kind of get the whole "oh, I'm the devil, am I? Yes, I'm a fearsome devil who's going to eat your soul!" thing. In fact, I seem to recall a friend of mine brandishing a broom, pitchfork-style at a fundamentalist classmate and shouting "I'm Satan!" and thinking this was pretty funny.

So, okay, I'm not expecting sophisticated, nuanced political debate from a metal band--indeed, I'm thinking metal bands should steer clear of politics altogether and stick to Satan, rock, sex and drinking as topics. (though if you want to stick it to Farrakhan, you could point out how he's the worst kind of contemptible hypocrite to cozy up to the government of the Sudan that trades black slaves today. But I digress.)

And I don't think this is any kind of serious white supremacist thing--it's just incredibly stupid. But can I purchase music by someone so dangerously dumb? (Well, I've bought Elvis Costello records after he famously dissed Ray Charles with a racist slur in order to piss of a member of the Stephen Stills band. I suppose I think there's a difference between spouting some idiocy when drunk in a bar and actually committing idiocy to tape in a recording studio, but perhaps I'm splitting hairs.) (And I saw Barbershop despite the presence of Ice Cube, who, you may recall, suggested that black folks should burn down Korean groceries in his song "Black Korea.")

And, I mean, surely Mr. Danzig isn't so stupid that he didn't anticipate the white supremacist moron crowd picking up on his little ditty. In fact, if you google "Danzig White Devil Rise", the first result is a chat board on a hate site. Oh, those pinheads are big Danzig fans. But, then again, I browsed around the site to see what other kinds of music the knuckle-dragging sheet-wearin' crowd was into. I found a lot of metal, but also Minor Threat, Cro-Mags (Do the idiots know they're Hare Krishnas? Do they care?) Husker Du (do the idiots know at least one member but probably more, I mean, come on with that handlebar mustache, was gay? Do they care?) and, on at least two posts, The Ramones (do the idiots know they're a bunch of Jews? Do they care?). Oh yeah, and Phil Collins. Not sure if they view his consistently ripping off the black man in his solo career as some sort of blow for whitey or what, but there he was.

So you can't dislike an artist because assholes happen to like them.

And if the artist being a nice person was a prerequisite for liking their art, we'd never look at another Picasso or listen to another Hank Williams song.

So can I rock out with impunity to songs from the first Danzig record? Or should I just go buy some Queens of the Stone Age and take my heavy rockin' riffs without the controversy?

Lick My Plate, D** D***!

I've discovered Chiller TV, which I suppose is the poor, or rather non-HD-equipped man's version of Monsters HD, which I seriously covet. (If you bothered clicking through there, you can see how much cooler Monsters HD is just by their EC-Comics-lookin' website. And yes, I'm a dork, but the existence of Monsters HD is totally making me want to go spend way too much money on an HDTV.)

But I haven't succumbed to useless consumerism just yet, so I'm stuck with Chiller TV. I've taken to checking it first after the kids go to bed. And last night, one of my favorite horror movies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, was on.

So far so good, but Chiller TV has commercials and bizarre censorship standards.

Here's what I mean--I watched the whole "evil psychos invade the radio station" sequence. And so we got Leatherface menacing the female DJ with a chainsaw, but then when the other guy went to say, "Lick my plate, dog dick!" all we got was "lick my plate!" I mean, can someone explain this to me? Whose community standards are the censors upholding here? It's okay to menace a woman with a chainsaw as long as you don't say "dick"? Who exactly is going to tune in to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and be offended by the use of the word dick? I mean, in this same scene, we saw a guy get his head bashed in with a hammer! But at least there was no profanity!

I think the whole discussion about the weird sexual chainsaw stuff in that scene must have been interesting. "It's okay to show Leatherface running the chainsaw up her bare leg, but we have to cut away before he gets to her cutoff-clad crotch. But the phallic thrusting with the chainsaw is okay."

I don't know. The whole concept of a censored horror channel is kind of strange, but not as strange as the censorship guidelines appear to be.

Sometimes it's easy being green

Last week my friend Scott took me to watch the Celtics beat the Cavaliers in game 2. We had a great time, and Scott's seats are amazing. Apparently the guy who went to game 1 reported that he'd sat next to Leo DiCaprio, who's filming a movie in the area. We had no such luck--for three quarters of the game, the only "celebrity" we saw was Lenny Clark, who's really stretching the definition of celebrity almost to the breaking point. Especially in Boston, where fat old Irish American guys who aren't very funny are very very easy to find.

But then I spied Jason Bateman! And we had better seats than he did! Anyway, Jason's a hero to the shorter man, not to mention a hero to those who appreciate a second act: he went from Teen Wolf Too to Arrested Development and a newly booming movie career. Good for him! And I kinda wanted to say something to him, but what was I going to say? "I like your work" ? "Too bad AD got canceled" ? "How'd you like to option one of my novels" ? Feh. I let him enjoy the basketball game, and I did the same.

About that game: the refs are clearly giving Lebron James the Michael Jordan treatment: they called outrageous fouls against the Celtics whenever they got near Lebron, all but shouting, "You've bothered Mr. James on his way to the basket! For shame!" One of the refs, a pockmarked bald old white guy, sang along when they played Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" on the PA.

It was a cool time and a great game. Now if they could only win on the road...