Reviews of everything

I have the best idea for a Halloween costume: steampunk robot Benjamin Disraeli, or Disraeli Gears. That said, my last Halloween costume idea went over like another bluesrock buzzword, so we’ll see.

So I’ve talked about Cream and Disraeli Gears. The album contains many great songs, but it’s too ADD – songs don’t even make it to three minutes before Clapton and co. are on to the next song, and the album is only 35 minutes long, so it’s not like they had too many ideas and not enough room. The album would be perfect if not for its inability to focus and overall short length.

These problems are more or less solved with Blind Faith – in fact, the whole album can be looked at as the simultaneous fleshing-out and perfection of many of the musical themes of Gears – a simultaneous incarnation and ascension, if you will. The album opens with “Had to Cry Today”, which is a piece centered around a downward guitar hook, much like “Sunshine of Your Love”. However, the Blind Faith song is over twice the length of its predecessor, leaving a lot of room for Clapton to just play the guitar, which he does. Everyone is happy. “Can’t Find My Way Home”, the shortest track on the album (and still longer than the average Gears track) contains more intricate guitarwork than just about anything on Gears, but has the high smooth vocals of tracks like “We’re Going Wrong” and “World of Pain”. At a certain point (which is now) the analogy breaks down because I am too lazy to actually continue providing evidence for it. “Well...All Right” has a lot of very good piano and is generally a pretty upbeat song. “Presence of the Lord”, like the Led Zeppelin song “In My Time of Dying”, invokes old stately Southern Gospel Religion in addition to a wonderful blues breakdown. One of my favorite bluesrock songs ever. “Sea of Joy”, despite its upbeat title, contains a barely restrained and unfulfilled longing, and also violins. “Do What You Like”, at over fifteen minutes, is everything a long jam should be. Overall, Blind Faith is even better than Disraeli Gears, and not nearly as well known for some reason. Get it.

On a completely different note, Metallica’s Master of Puppets is an album that I like a lot more than I would have expected. I believe that this is because it is much more melodic than I would expect from their other stuff. It’s still thrash, so there’s a lot of rhythm and noise, but it’s not too distorted that I can’t tell what notes are being played. The track lengths range from five minutes to eight-and-a-half minutes, in contrast to The Black Album, which ranges from 3:45 to 7:00, a small but telling difference. Metallica simply put more thought into each song back then, and it shows. Song structures are not monolithic, rhythms are more complex, everything is melodic and yet unapologetically thrash, in contrast again to The Black Album, where some songs are melodic and others are thrash and everything is short and digestible. Fully half of the tracks start with something that is not heavy distorted guitar, and there’s a lot of sonic experimentation, particularly towards the last half of the album. That said, it’s Metallica: it’s loud, it’s heavy, and “Disposable Heroes” is my favorite angry song (“You will do/ What I say/ When I say BACK TO THE FRONT/ You will die/ When I say/ You must die BACK TO THE FRONT”).

On to films: I saw Up. It was Pixar and therefore good. I wasn’t overwhelmed, to be honest, but I was charmed by the fairy tale of a house flying through the sky under the power of hundreds of helium balloons. I also really enjoyed the opening minutes in which the main character lives the vast majority of his life in a series of vignettes. An adventure movie in which the protagonist is a pottering old man is just delightfully unique, which is what we expect from Pixar. The movie isn’t Toy Story or The Incredibles or Ratatouille, but it’s certainly better than Cars (“hey remember the sixties? yeah, good times.”) or A Bug’s Life, which was anthropomorphized to death (sounds odd to say that was the problem. After all, Pixar’s whole schtick is anthropomorphizing things, right? Well, to a certain extent. The toys are still very much toys, the fish are still very much fish, and the rats are still very much rats, but the insects are really just people from the feudal era in insect costumes. Meh. Guys, anyone who makes an insect movie should take a page from Watership Down – make the characters believable as small, frightened beings in a world where they’re not the top of the food chain. Aaanyway.)

Pulp Fiction: here’s a game. It’s called “Quoting Tarantino Without Using Profanity”. You go first.

...

I win!

So having seen Kill Bill and Reservoir Dogs, I think I can safely join my voice to the majority and say that this is his best work. Really, the movie, despite its action flick pretense, is a slice-of-life about such engaging characters as Samuel Jackson, Bruce Willis, and John Travolta. No, really. Anyone who can get me to care about all three of those people in the course of one movie is a genius. The dialogue is of course witty, interesting, irrelevant, and obscene. You should probably just see it, because it’s good.

Spirited Away: So Miyazaki’s more or less the Pixar of Japan. He makes movies with strange premises, and he doesn’t usually miss. He’s a lot more fairy tale than Pixar is – fairy tale is a genre in which ordinary people are put in a deadly, treacherous world with a set of rules that are completely unclear, and which allow for unspeakable evil and otherwise impossible beauty. Fairy tales were originally magic realism, but the realism has aged to the point where it’s no longer realistic. Spirited Away is my favorite of the three-and-some-bits of his movies I’ve seen so far, and concern a young girl’s attempt to get a witch to turn her parents back from pigs into people. The plot is the least important part of the film. What is important are the incredible details of setting Miyazaki works in. Also good: Howl’s Moving Castle (a giant steampunk hut of Baba Yaga, a young handsome shapeshifting wizard, airship battles, and a young girl very suddenly aged into an old woman) and Porco Rosso (post-WWI fighter pilots. 40s-era class. The main character is inexplicably a pig.)

Blade Runner: another movie I should have seen a long time ago, but didn’t. Vangelis’ soundtrack is excellent (he was almost in Yes at one point. Also Jimmy Page had a couple of sessions with Alan White and Chris Squire. Listen to them.) It is increasingly clear that what I look for in works of either sci-fi or fantasy is not encyclopedically catalogued worlds, nor is it either your typical fantasy setting or “our world – but with robots!” Rather, what I like most is hints of a world that is very different. I don’t want to know everything about the robotic uprising of the late nineties, but I do want to know what trying to get a bowl of chow mein is like in 20XX, possibly as a result of the robotic uprising of the late nineties. This is why I like Cowboy Bebop – that’s pretty much the whole show. This is why I prefer Asimov’s robot stories to the Foundation books. If you want encyclopedic, Tolkien already won, so you’re just wasting your time. I’m looking at you, Frank Herbert.

But Blade Runner: not only do we see what getting a bow of chow mein is like in 20XX, we also see what being a lonely yet brilliant genetic engineer is like in 20XX, and so forth. Blade Runner has so much detail and backstory that is never explained (at least not in the director’s cut, without Harrison Ford’s I-am-given-to-understand-incessant voiceover) but which adds so much to the world. Ford’s kitchen is incredibly detailed. The slums are detailed. The office buildings are detailed. As if that weren’t enough, we also have the grand myth of the supermen, isolated, shunned by society, hunted down by bounty hunters, and exceedingly mortal. Now I really, really, really want to play Shadowrun. Someone needs to start a game. I shall play a VTA pilot, burnt out on cybernetic enhancements and stimulants, whose twin loves are flight and really good jazz. Ah, Shadowrun. Its genius in one concept: an elf who is the ruthless CEO of a company with environmentally irresponsible policies. Subvert racial stereotypes indeed.

In other RPG news, I’m running a campaign. Unknown Armies, a mechanically simple occult horror game. Set in modern-day Paris. Two sessions so far, both of which have gone well. The characters are investigating a murder in their apartment building. The woman was found dead in her bathtub, her throat slit. This is complicated by a small marble of obscure but presumably mystic function found at the scene, the pawprint and later silhouette of a very, very large cat, and the three warnings from three different sources against trusting the detectives and requesting the characters’ appearance at, coincidentally, the same time at, coincidentally, the same place. The PCs show up, are confused, as are the three sources who are not overfond of each other. Argument is cut short by the entry of men with guns, who are (eventually) cut short by the three sources, one of whom rips up half a pew and uses it as a baseball bat, another of whom causes a would-be hostage taker to explode in a cloud of blood and intestines, causing the pew-wielder to turn on him accusing him of witchcraft. The dust settles, and most of the PCs and the two non-witchcrafty NPCs are in the legendary sewers of Paris with a gutshot Pole. Further updates as situation warrants.

Books: I’m struggling to get through Proust, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and an ever-expanding list of theological works. You, however, don’t have to bother with that, because you can just go find books by Shaun Tan, an Australian sometime-children’s author. The Arrival, one of the best books I have ever read, has no words except the title and publication information, but tells the story of an immigrant to Ellis Island – or is it? No, but it’s the magical realist equivalent. Beautiful art, sometimes terrifying, made me cry at the end.

So I think I’m going to end up writing very good potboiler sci-fi for a living. I am okay with this. Possibly some webcomics or comicbooks will be involved if I can partner with someone who’s good at art. I have friends who are good at art. We shall see.

Speaking of webcomics – there are a lot of them! The internet is big! How are you supposed to know which ones are good? It is simple! I will tell you!

xkcd: used to be good. Randall Munroe no longer puts thought into the art or the jokes and is just generally self-righteous and whiny. The archives are worth a trip, though.

Art: 0 (3) of 5. Humor: 1 (4) of 5. Coherent story: N/A. Likeable characters: N/A. Charm: 0 (5) of 5. (Parenthetical numbers are “old” xkcd.)

Dinosaur Comics: Ryan North uses the same six clip-art panels of inaccurately colored dinosaurs stomping on anachronistic items almost every day for this comic. There are over a thousand strips. No, really.

Art: What? Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: N/A. Idiosyncratic use of language for purposes of awesome: 5 of 5.

Achewood: Anthropomorphic animals being variously adorable, contemptible, creepy, rich, angsty, ditzy.

Art: Serviceable. Humor: 3 of 5. Coherent story: surprisingly, yes. Likeable characters: Roast Beef. Idiosyncratic use of language for purposes of awesome: 5 of 5.

Questionable Content: Hipsters. Sometimes they are witty. More often they are melodramatic.

Art: Actually pretty good. Humor: on average, 2 of 5. Coherent story: mostly boring. Obscure music references: all of them.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: He is an Irish M.D. ninja. His secretary is a gorilla named Judy. His sidekick is a twelve-year-old mustache-having bandito gunslinger on a velociraptor. That’s the least ridiculous stuff.

Art: Very good. Humor: 5 of 5. Coherent story: Yes. Sum total of awesome: Yes.

Subnormality: Work is put into this one. Walls o’ text. Lots of art.

Art: Amazing! Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: not really. Obnoxious political rants: sometimes.

A Softer World: Joey Comeau takes three photographs. Each is accompanied by a probably irrelevant line of text, which is usually cynical.

Art: Good photography. Humor: 3 of 5. Coherent story: no. Gets old after a while: yes.

Cyanide and Happiness: there is a line between what is decent and what is not decent. C&H never crosses that line – it is permanently on the other side.

Art: 1 of 5. Humor: 3 of 5. Nauseating: 5 of 5.

Dresden Codak: Not really sure. Transhumanism is involved somehow. Also sometimes D&D with philosophers!

Art: 5 of 5. Humor: erm. Coherent story: it tries.

Lackadaisy: Prohibition-era St. Louis. With cats.

Art: 5 of 5. Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: 5 of 5. Likeable characters: 5 of 5.

Gunnerkrigg Court: It starts with magical realism – an enormous school, robots, sentient shadows, and one girl in the middle of it. Lately it’s been trying to be Harry Potter.

Art: 4 of 5. Humor: eh. Coherent story: too coherent. Likeable characters: no one likes Harry.

8-Bit Theater: Final Fantasy sprites. Game-based jokes.

Art: 1 of 5. Humor: 3 of 5. Coherent story: yes. Characters: one-dimensional.

Order of the Stick: stick figures, D&D-based jokes.

Art: 2 of 5. Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: one of the better ones. Characters: actually pretty likeable.

Girl Genius: alt-history steampunk/magical Europe. Hilarity ensues.

Art: 4 of 5. Humor: not the point. Coherent story: yes. Likeable characters: Jägermonsters, virtually invincible killing beasts which speak with a very heavy German-ish accent. Yes, they’re likeable – why do you ask?

Pictures for Sad Children: Simply drawn, magical realism, dark humor. Good times.

Art: 2 of 5. Humor: 3 of 5. Pavs: 5 of 5.

Now you ask, "Levi, what is pavs?" I shall define it: pavs [pävs] adj. the quality of being both adorable and tragic, in the manner of a three-legged puppy. Language of origin: a much longer Indian word I don't know which means something similar, through a particularly linguistically influential person in my dorm, who a) knows many, many languages; b) speaks in vague and truncated terms like, "so, basc [baysk], here's this thing, and it's totes like, whatevs..." and so forth. Thus, pavs. Those of us who have watched much Battlestar Galactica (the newer series) use "boomerpavs" for something that is even more pavs. If you have watched it (and, y'know, it's pretty good. Not as good as Cowboy Bebop or Firefly, but good.) you will know why.

And yes. I'm currently at home for a week. I'll write about that later. Currently I am exhausted from riding my bike forever.

Behold, I return!

So I think I've stabilized at this point: I have a place to stay, I may or may not get paid next week (the bureaucracy lost my time card), I have food and a small amount of money, I'm not wasting all my time on webcomics and online puzzle games. So that's good.

We've got a lot of ground to cover, and I'll try to make it fast. I notice with some horror that I haven't written anything significant here since before spring break. This is unacceptable. We need to catch up. Let's do this doubletime. No punctuation. With banjos. So we tookalittletrainoverta San Francisco three days couldn't shower couldn't get much sleep got there atealottafood but I don't like Indian went through two museums went through used bookstores lookin at every cover on every sci-fi book bought some books with excellent and gratuitous iconically sci-fi covers annI cutthecoversoff annI tapedemtomydoor when we got back.

So that was spring break. That was also a literary experiment I don't care to repeat. As for spring quarter: Physics - Meh. Philosophy - our professor was tiny Jewish badass, but never stayed on subject ("What is Nerf, anyway?"). We read Hume, Kant, Billy Budd by Melville, and Heart of Darkness by Conrad. We also watched Apocalypse Now. The philosophy I didn't get a lot out of. I'm not much for analytic philosophy. I'm told I should read Sartre and Camus and such people. Billy Budd also left me cold, but Heart of Darkness was excellent. It's kind of but not exactly like a Lovecraft novella. See, Lovecraftian cosmology works like this: man is unimaginably tiny and irrelevant in a universe which is huge, illogical, and utterly alien. In his stories, this works out to there being older much more powerful beings which terrorize the main characters through most of the story until they discover that there are even older and more powerful and terrifying creatures. Then they run like hell and the story ends. Heart of Darkness can be thought of as the same sort of thing, but one rung up: from the point of view of the natives of Africa, the European colonizers are the Old Ones or the Shadow from Out of Time who come with their incomprehensible technology and culture and non-Euclidean geometry. However, Conrad has us see things from the point of view of Marlow, who is horrified by the sepulchral cities of his own civilization as much as by the primordial savagery he encounters in Africa. Good book. As for Apocalypse Now, "Charlie don't surf."

More classes: the course on Lolita ended up being worthless; everything was about artifice and how clever Nabokov is. While yes, Nabokov is certainly a technical genius, having assignments like, "Draw the hotel room at the Enchanted Hunters" is not particularly helpful to understanding the novel, nor is it interesting. We watched both the Kubrick and Lyne film adaptations and had to write, not reviews, but parodies of reviews. I got a good grade on my first parody despite the professor almost certainly having no clue who I was parodying (she called it a "clever, subtle parody". I basically quoted some paragraphs with only slight modifications from T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and just made the rest sound vaguely British.) Our midterm grades came from writing 20 questions for a midterm test based on questions Nabokov would have asked. All you had to do was come up with questions that were either ridiculously pretentious - "Plot Jean Farlow on minus time-space or plus soul-time. Do not feel constrained by the Cartesian plane." - or blindingly obvious - "Is Humbert insane?" I eventually stopped going to class and took the damn thing pass or fail. I passed. She apparently really liked my work.

Incidentally, if you want a film adaptation, the Kubrick's the one for you. The Lyne one is mindnumbingly bad.

On the other hand, the course on Ulysses was superb, not least because the book is absolutely brilliant, and it was very useful to reread it in a structured setting. While the professor did dwell a bit much on gendered readings of the text, she wasn't bad, and my TA was excellent - very elitist, knowledgeable, funny, and mostly having the same reasons for liking literature that I do.

So yes, school went relatively well. I think I shall leave this a mostly factual post and get to overall generalizations and issues next post.

Except to say that in the past couple of days I have listened to nothing but Michael Jackson and King Crimson. That's a juxtaposition for you.

My poor neglected progeny

By Tuesday, I will have spent four nights in four different places. Then I will move into my apartment the 21st. This is a bestcase scenario, and I could end up being even more mobile.

So I survived my first year of college. I now have to survive living on my own (more or less) for a summer. I am slightly more worried about this. I am also excited - though I will be working full time, I will have more time to help with my church up here and to write - and to hang out with friends from my dorm (a surprising number of whom are staying in Chicago over the summer) and to run a campaign (Unknown Armies, a relatively obscure, mechanically simple roleplaying system geared toward paranoia a la Foucault's Pendulum and actual roleplaying and storytelling).

Once the madness has subsided, I will issue the obligatory freshman year retrospective, and respond to the comments on earlier posts (sorry, commenters). I'm not going to say that I will update regularly, since that from me is now meaningless, but I will try.

See, this is kind of regular.

Alright, so another quarter draws to a close. What have I learned? This: the internet is a hydra. Each head is trying to find another way to devour my time, health, and sanity. If I don't get my act together, I will end up writing a webcomic about Christian theology for the rest of my life. Awesome as that could be, it's not exactly the direction I was planning to go with said life. Besides which, I can't draw.

In music this week, I review albums that are thirty-seven and forty-two years old, respectively, because they are good albums and you should listen to them. First, David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (Ziggy Stardust if you want to be able to end the sentence before running out of breath): this is a concept album about, well, I'm not really sure. There's a rock star who may be an alien from outer space (though my interpretation is that this is just part of his act) who is trying to spread a message of love and peace while the rock'n'roll lifestyle drags him downward. Also the world has run out of resources or something and will end in five years. But that's not important. The songs are all superbly crafted and flow from one to the next, not just musically but emotionally as well. There is a coherent story here, though Bowie's fragmented, sometimes ludicrous lyrics ("I'm an alligator/ I'm a mama-papa coming for you/ I'm a space invader/ I'll be a rock'n'rolling bitch for you" and "The kids was just crass/ He was the nazz/ With god-given ass" - WHAT.) make it difficult to follow. It's fascinating how Bowie manages to communicate so much while making no sense whatsoever. Texturally, songs are simple driving guitar chords or else simple driving piano chords with very minimalist guitar riffs, accompanied by Bowie's somewhat nasal yet emotionally effective voice. More or less.

The opening song is "Five Years", about the despair gradually settling on the world in the face of not a bang but a whimper; Bowie's repeated cries of "five years!" recalls Roger Water's hoarse shouting on The Wall (yeah, The Wall postdates Ziggy Stardust by seven years, whatever.) "Moonage Daydream" has simultaneously some of the best and worst lyrics on the entire album (the first fragment above is the first stanza of this song, which also includes the awesome lines "Keep your electric eyes on me babe/ Put your ray gun to my throat".) The album generally and this song specifically also win the award for "Best Prominent Use of Strings In A Manner Neither Cheesy Nor Pretentious". There's "It Ain't Easy", which chorus has the force of a gospel choir. "Hang On To Yourself" marks the rising action, the beginning of the final chapter of Ziggy Stardust's meteoric career. "Suffragette City" basically just rocks, and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" marks a final redemption for the burned-out rock star. Superb pop album to the point where I will perhaps adopt the "Ziggy" as a unit of pop goodness. (Ziggy Stardust ranks 5 Z, as do Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper; Björk's Debut rates 4 Z, and Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes as well as U2's Joshua Tree, while their Achtung Baby rates 3 Z along with Coldplay's Viva La Vida and The New Pornographer's Challengers.)

Other album: Cream's Disraeli Gears. While it clocks in at only 33 minutes, it is 33 minutes of alternating very good bluesrock ("Sunshine of Your Love" and "Swlabr") and excellent hazy psychedelia ("Tales of Brave Ulysses" and "We're Going Wrong"). The vocal harmonies are smooth ("creamy" is actually the best term for it), Clapton's guitar is excellent and bluesy, and this is the album that marks the point where blues met rock and had the best one-night stand ever which resulted in the birth of beautiful things like Led Zeppelin. Note that I can't rank it in terms of Ziggys, since it is, broadly, "rock" and not "pop", as somewhat arbitrarily defined by me.

Well, I was looking around the internet the other day, and I noticed that not one person on the internet has an opinion on Watchmen the movie. Naturally, it falls to me to correct this situation. [Spoiler alert] The movie is a lot of fun if you've read the book. Some things are delightful to see on screen (Rorschach's prison stint, Archie, the Comedian, Manhattan's Mars clockpalace), and the opening montage was quite enjoyable. I believe Rorschach, Manhattan and Ozymandias all put in solid acting performances (not everyone did), and I understand why they cut minor characters and removed the exploding squid psybomb - okay, but the way they handled the ending was, frankly, terrible: a) they decided to blow up not just New York BUT ALSO Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, etc. - but they don't show any of those other explosions, just computer displays indicating that Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, etc. are all blowing up and incidentally have identical buildings in identical places at their respective ground zeroes. (I'm pretty sure that's what I saw, anyway. Could have been wrong.) So we really are only emotionally invested in New York (except not so much even there, since we don't really know any of the minor characters whose deaths lend gravitas and pathos to the scene in the book). It came off as a cheap attempt to up the ante, and was unnecessary. b) Nite Owl is present when Manhattan kills Rorschach. This is completely unnecessary and only serves to have him fall to his knees screaming "NOOOOOOOO", which is bad, and then rush back inside and c) punch an unresisting Ozymandias multiple times. Alright, so this is pretty serious: the nuance of the heroes' reactions to Ozymandias in the book are key: there is so much ambiguity as to who is in the right, if anyone, and that is pretty much excised in the movie: Nite Owl's stance is that he won't reveal the plot, but he thinks Ozymandias is scum. This is a far cry from the book: 

"How...how can humans make decisions like this? We're damned if we stay quiet, Earth's damned if we don't. We...okay. Okay, count me in. We say nothing."

Why, exactly, is it necessary to change that? All of which is nothing compared to d) The last scene between Manhattan and Ozymandias is completely removed. You remember that one?

"I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end."

"'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."

Yeah, the one that defined the entire tone of the ending and thus the entire story. They replaced that with Silk Spectre saying, "If Jon were here, he'd say, 'Nothing ever ends.'" Need I explain how awful this is?

Also, some of the soundtrack was kind of jerky. My biggest problem was the abrupt "Sound of Silence" for the Comedian's funeral. Don't get me wrong - I love Simon and Garfunkel, but it felt forced.

Like I said, the movie was fun, primarily, I think, for people who have read the book. It can't compare to the original, is likely to be incomprehensible and boring to those who haven't read the book, and contains some remarkably poor scriptwriting choices, but it's a fun movie. Dark Knight was a better comic book movie, but was also not perfect (there were parts that didn't involve Heath Ledger, for instance). Lord of the Rings had to bear the albatross of its inability to live up to the source material as well, and thus also contains many disappointing moments (Mordor was quite poorly done, for instance; Sauron should never have been a physical eye); I guess the thing to do in these cases is enjoy the movie, have fun discussing utilitarian v. deontological ethics in terms of Rorschach v. Ozymandias, and reread the book. So do that.

Utilitarianism is loathsome, incidentally.

The beginning of more regular blogposts. No, really.

Music: Scoured other people's computers for good music with my scotch-taped-together flashdrive. The idea is that I will eventually buy the good albums and delete the bad ones, so it's basically like checking them out from the library. And not returning them for years. So I'm not really stealing. Anyway. Two albums thus dredged up:

In Through The Out Door - it's a late Zeppelin album. I'm not sure how it will stand up to repeat listenings. What makes it interesting on first listen - John Paul Jones on keyboard for every song - may ultimately be what dooms it. Zeppelin isn't really meant for this more synthesized pop sound, I think. The longest piece on the album, "Carouselambra", is basically the same keyboard riff for ten minutes. It is surprisingly enjoyable, but I can't believe that I won't eventually get tired of it. I've come to the conclusion that Led Zeppelin is good at basically two things: grime ("Whole Lotta Love", "Heartbreaker" from II, "When the Levee Breaks" from IV, "In My Time Of Dying" from Physical Graffiti) and really intricate guitar work ("Since I've Been Loving You" from III, "Going to California" from IV, and basically all of Houses of the Holy). Obviously, that's an oversimplification, and there are several songs on many of their albums that are simply just well-done pop songs, but without at least one of those elements, the album seems somehow inadequate. The albums with a good mix of both (II, IV, and Physical Graffiti) are probably their best. Even Houses of the Holy, a superbly crafted album, suffers due to its lack of grit and blues.

Björk's first album, Debut. I originally got this album due to a combination of liking the drum part and vocals for "Human Behavior" and the fact that Björk is all dryadish in the accompanying video. She's joined Tori Amos and Regina Spektor in the Trifecta of Women in Alternative Music Who Are Also Imbedded In Levi's Subconscious. After listening to it a few times, though, I realize that it's a very good album. Which is odd, because 1) it is NOT my usual genre, and 2) is not, except for "Human Behavior", very accessible. What makes it a good album is, first, Björk's exceptional attack and, second, the fact that all the samples and other sonic elements, individually uninteresting, combine to form a coherent whole. For instance: "Like Someone In Love", which is what it sounds like, a love ballad backed by nothing less than a harp, is accompanied by the sound of heavy machinery and trucks shifting. It's very subtle, but an interesting effect. Not enough to carry the song on its own - without Björk's voice, none of the songs would work - but the idiosyncrasies and superb vocals make it an album well worth relistening to. Am also listening to Volta, which is pretty good too.

Don't think I've mentioned Porcupine Tree yet, which is a shame. I've been told I need to listen to their newer stuff, which apparently falls somewhere between prog rock and prog metal, but I've enjoyed On the Sunday of Life... - their first album, full of psychedelia and melodic goodness.

And basically, Allegri's Miserere is one of the best pieces ever. So good, in fact, that the Pope kept it in a vault in the Vatican and forbade its distribution - it was only permitted to be performed on special occasions and was at all other times kept under close wraps (think the Declaration of Independence in National Treasure); that is, until Mozart attended a single performance, went home and wrote the whole thing down from memory. The Pope was so impressed that he didn't excommunicate him. The text is Psalm 51, which basically sums up the Bible (it's good; read it).

Literature: Lolita is the great American novel: American in the sense that it is about America. Reading Lolita while in New Mexico listening to Simon & Garfunkel, or, better yet, The Doors, is about as American as anything. Hopefully, I will get into a course on Lolita next quarter, as well as a course on Faulkner. There was a course on Ulysses available as well, but it would have conflicted with my Humanities course, which, next quarter, should be taught by one Ted Cohen, who writes about aesthetics in philosophy, has published a book on the philosophy of jokes, and is by all accounts an entertaining storyteller. So all of that is exciting.

I haven't really read that much lately, except for required readings and Nabokov. I've started The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco - the story of a man who forgets his past life except for what he's read in books and magazines, seen in films, and absorbed from other cultural debris. I need to finish it. I also need to read The Sound of the Fury, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing by Kierkegaard, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, In Search of Lost Time by Proust, and a volume of lectures by Borges. Meaning the webcomics and manga need to stop being priority.

Winter quarter is winding down, which is good since I've lost 2/3 of the buttons on my heavy coat. They're in the pocket, where my hands have to go in order to hold the coat shut, and I keep rolling them around in my hand, but haven't done anything about it yet. It at one point got to -30 here in Chicago, not counting windchill, I'm told. I was inside for most of that. Now I can go around in my hoodie, which is nice.

My girlfriend is in Germany and will remain so for 99 days. That is all. Good night.