Is garbagepunk a word? Because it should be.

Gorillaz' Demon Days opens with a very noir oboe, punctuated by sirens, timpani, and an incomprehensible loop of some garbled rap lyric. The image of a dimly lit alley, graffiti scrawled on the brick walls, trash cans overflowing, is inescapable. And as a good intro should, it sets the tone for the underworld, counterculture feel of the album. Listening to the album is a lot like scrambling through an enormous junkyard. To be clear, that's a good thing. The album flows well, but that doesn't mean it's predictable. Every track is not quite what you expected, and though some are difficult to categorize as good songs on their own ("November Has Come", "All Alone", "White Light"), nothing is dead weight. If you're going to look at a junkyard with an eye for the aesthetic, you're going to have to use a very different metric than that you would use for a garden: everything here is interesting. Here the city's refuse has assumed the shape of a cathedral, the altar an overturned turntable ("O Green World") - there the contours of a Miami highrise ("Kids With Guns"). "Dirty Harry", one of the strongest songs on the album, is a good example of how this garbage approach to music works: it starts with a catchy synthesizer riff and a driving cowbell. The bass enters, a sort of off-beat jaunty staccato, and is joined by the drums and a children's choir:

I need a gun to keep myself from harm

The poor people are burning in the sun

They ain't got a chance, they ain't got a chance

I need a gun, cause all I do is dance

Cause all I do is dance.

The song then goes into a brief strings interlude before breaking it down into an anti-war rap (a pretty good one) and then resumes with the choir and bass. It then segues into the crazed laughter of "Feel Good, Inc." - and let me just say, if this song does not make you dance inside, you have no soul. Perhaps the catchiest, darkest bass groove ever devised, under a quiet guitar arpeggiation and the two-ton weight of a junkie's addiction:

You got a new horizon it's ephemeral style

A melancholy town where we never smile

And all I wanna hear is the message beep

My dreams they gotta kiss because I don't get sleep, no

Then it opens up into an ethereal acoustic guitar for the chorus before reverting to a surprisingly unsettling rap, given that it uses the lines, "It's my chocolate attack" and "Care bear bumping in the heart of this here". It goes ABABA, ending, as it began, with insane laughter. You have the drugged-out hazy dance groove of "DARE", the mostly-spoken folktale "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head" - a rather heavy-handed but well done anti-imperialist polemic - and the gospel choir of "Demon Days" to finish off an always-interesting, often-excellent album. I'll get in Plastic Beach at a later date.

tinker tailor hipster nerd

The first thing you're going to notice when listening to Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal (who are in fact of Athens, Georgia - the juxtaposition of the B-52s and Of Montreal in my head is doing interesting things.) is that there is a hell of a lot going on. (The first thing you're going to notice about this blogpost is that I have once again jammed a bloated parenthetical in between the subject and the predicate. Again. In the very first sentence. So much for that.) There are layers of production, multiple vocal lines chasing each other round, plenty of weird instruments, abrupt mid-song stylistic shifts - sometimes two or three per song. You will already have noticed - from the band name, album title, and songs called "An Eluardian Instance", "Beware Our Nubile Miscreants", and "Triphallus, to Punctuate!" - that you are in for some pretty hipster times, and nothing you will hear is going to contradict that. The lyrics are swollen masses of referentiality and are mostly incomprehensible. What might surprise you, however, is how much you will enjoy it.

The first song, "Nonpareil of Favor", opens with a harpsichord, followed quickly by an irresistibly upbeat rhythm section and a catchy pop tune which lasts all of a minute-and-a-quarter before slipping into something more comfortable: a slowed-down swinging verse which makes it maybe half another minute before they decide that what they really want to do with this song is hammer the same chord very loudly for a couple more minutes, accompanied by harpsichord. Then they decide that they're instead going to hammer the same chord more quietly under a hazy mix of vocalization and...celeste, I think? It's better than it sounds - the hammering in the middle is jarring at first, but they do good things with it.

Third song: "For Our Elegant Caste" opens with the immortal lines,

We can do it softcore if you want

But you should know I take it both ways

We can do it softcore if you want

But you know that I go both ways

The next iteration of these lines turns into a round, mostly in falsetto, and this brings up another characteristic of of Montreal: they are the single gayest-sounding band I have ever come across - quite apart from their lyrics, which admittedly don't contradict that impression. For me, this is utterly delightful, though the exuberant camp might grate on some people.

Another characteristic is their habit of inserting bits of - sometimes spoken - dialogue into their songs: from "An Eluardian Instance",

You sat me down, we had some drinks

And you told me all kinds of insanity

I asked your friend if you were available

She answered, "no, but yes, oh well oh well yes and no."

From "Women's Studies Victims",

Then threw me out into the snow, I waited for the bus

Up came some values voters screaming are you one of us?

I said, "Of course man can't you see I've got some text reconstruction?"

(What does that mean?) No clue. It must be illicit - pentagram.

(What are you talking about?) No clue.

And from "Triphallus, to Punctuate!",

"You should call me sometime.

I won't answer but at least I'll know you care."

"How will you know it was me?"

"What do you think, I've got caller ID."

Which is charming, is the point.

Also! These songs are incredibly obscene in the most delightful way imaginable. "Plastis Wafers", for instance:

I confess to being quite charmed

By your feminine affects

You're the only one with whom

I would roleplay Oedipus Rex

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know what it's like to be inside you

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know how it feels

There's really a hell of a lot to say about this album, and you should listen to it yourself, so I'll leave you some surprises, but just a quick overview: "For Our Elegant Caste" is two-and-a-half minutes of the most enjoyable ear-heroin I've ever come across; "Gallery Piece" is a wonderfully schizoid love song; "Women's Studies Victims" is the perfectly representative blend of pointless referentiality, interpolated dialogue, and really catchy upbeat tunes; "Plastis Wafers" is both incredibly catchy and so very obscene. In summary! Fifteen very catchy, layered, ADHD songs. Well worth listening to.

Last week I said I would deliver my opinion on the state of the world. Then I realized that this would be stupid as I just have half-educated guesses based on very limited and probably inaccurate readings of Marx, collateral knowledge of economics, and wild extrapolation. Thus I will not do that, instead sticking to subjects I know things about. Next week - let's see - how about Gorillaz' Demon Days and Plastic Beach? That sounds good. Should get some film in as well. Season 5 of Doctor Who, or maybe one of Clint Eastwood's westerns. Also literature assuming I have time to read. Eventually I'll finish Swann's Way. Been in the middle of it for over a year now goddamn.

Side note: somewhere back in the archives - way, way back - there's a cringingly embarrassing fanboyish rant about xkcd. I think for the sake of honesty, integrity, and justice, that I should say that the person who wrote that was young and foolish and that xkcd - and the nerd culture that has sprung up around it - is little more than festering shitegobs predicated on, among other things, a tribal mentality of "us" v. "them", a smug assumption of false superiority, a belief that a store of utterly trivial knowledge somehow makes one a better person, the utterly perplexing belief that having Asperger's Syndrome is a virtue, and a mindless conformity to all of the above.

To clarify: I understand where these self-described nerds are coming from. It's a lot like the worldview of me and my peers - we're all fairly elitist, we all like stereotypically nerdy things - roleplaying games, sci-fi television shows, superhero comics, video games - and there's more than one aspy in our ranks. But there are differences. We don't have the martyr complex of the high school nerd, we don't judge people by how much Batman trivia they know - and more importantly, we have knowledge - and discussions - of the non-trivial variety: about literature, physics, biology, chemistry, history, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, higher math, Talmud, Bible, music, art, psychology, sociology - you get the point. The point is, we're intellectuals, not nerds. We've all been - and many of us still are, to some extent - part of the nerd culture I've described. The thing is, we all grow out of it.

The fetishization of the nerd is a perplexing, fairly recent pop culture phenomenon. If you've seen the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the past few years, you've noticed it: the immense hype surrounding it, the movies and books that have been made about it, the media personalities condescending to the victorious middle-schooler who is orders of magnitude more literate than they. And, by and large, it's awful. Don't get me wrong, I love the spelling bee. But my god is it painful to watch the media milk adorable younger siblings of contestants, or interviewers asking some eighth-grader who was favored to win how it feels to be eliminated in the fifth round on some word only spellable if you've happened to have come across it before. Also, Akeelah and the Bee was an unholy abomination and should have been aborted in the first trimester.

Or perhaps you've watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which is about the lives of physicists as imagined by someone who's never actually hung out with any sort of intellectual. The laugh track is the least objectionable portion of the show. Or perhaps you've come across My Life Is Average, a website founded in response to the pathetic whinging of Fuck My Life, a website populated entirely by anecdotes of stupid people about their terrible lives. MLIA started out as a rather clever statement, where people would post completely mundane, uneventful stories about their lives. Then it became a circle-jerk for nerds to congratulate each other on how delightfully quirky their lives were and how they recognized that Harry Potter was superior to Twilight, apparently forgetting that one step above awful is still just mediocre. Or, again, maybe you've come across the creepy, bitchy, faux-intellectual, artless pile of shit that is xkcd. I used to call these people nerd posers. Then I decided that they were real nerds and I was not. And that's fine with me.

Probably I should justify this vitriol. In particular, I realize that my accusations of "a tribal mentality of 'us' and 'them'" and "a smug assumption of false superiority" may seem hypocritical, and that this whole thing may seem like mere wankery. So let me justify my statements a bit more: I have a friend, a third-year undergraduate, and young for that, who gives talks on mathematical logic at graduate conferences, and knows a great deal about literary theory, philosophy, foreign film, Kafka, and midrash. I have multiple friends who know so many languages it will make your head explode. I have a friend who reads Heidegger for fun. I have an undergraduate friend who is trying to get a Ph.D. in Classics so that he can become a practicing neurosurgeon. And yes, we are far too insular; and yes, we all, virtually without exception, fanboy or -girl hard over Doctor Who; and yes, many of us have inside jokes which stem from our Shadowrun campaigns; but we don't glory in being unable to interact with people outside our peer group; we accept people who think Zelda is the protagonist of Ocarina of Time; we don't consider non-intellectuals beneath us.

...except for nerds.

Not convinced there's a difference? Yeah, I get that. Not very convincing. I'm not quite communicating here. This is my emotional reaction, and I have yet to completely rationalize it (that might seem a bit ex post facto to you, but I think that's a big part of how our minds work. The reaction is prior, and if you can honestly justify it, then good, and if not, you need to fix your reaction.) So I'll keep working on that - I welcome any input - but I do sincerely think there is something severely wrong with nerd culture as it currently exists.

One last note, re: Asperger's - I hope my comments won't be misinterpreted as prejudice. I have a moderately high-functioning cousin with Asperger's, and a couple of close friends who are quite high-functioning - not that "some of my best friends are, etc.", but rather that I've had some experience with it. Obviously, it's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's something that makes your life more difficult in a lot of ways - something you have to struggle against. My cousin, for instance, can instantly detect spelling and grammatical errors in a document, but has a hard time grasping that not everyone is as interested in All in the Family or ALF as he is. One of my friends has had to reverse engineer a sense of humor and is knowledgeable about theories of humor, which is admirable, but he doesn't have the instinctive feel for it that most people do, and so he tends to say legitimately very witty things at inopportune moments. What I dislike - and I'm open to correction on this point - is people who feel that Asperger's excuses their antisocial, obsessive behaviors and that they therefore don't have to try to change, and everyone else should just put up with it.

Oh, and you should really check out the blog I linked above. It's amazing.

Haha, but seriously, what.

So apparently someone sometime decided that Sid Vicious and his ilk had a really good thing going with the whole 80s British punk rock thing, but what that sound really needed was to be run through a filter of 90s British girl-pop, and thus Shampoo came to be. Now, I realize that music is constantly shifting and evolving, and I listen to a lot of weird music, but that is probably the strangest concept for a band I have ever heard. It doesn't make any fucking sense. Who hears "I - WANT TO BE - ANARCHY" and thinks "that, but with Miley Cyrus"? More things in heaven and earth, etc., and the thing is, I actually kind of like it. We Are Shampoo (1994), their first album (and the only one anyone really cares about - most of the rest were Japan-only releases, because that makes as much sense as the rest of it) is certainly not the best album I've ever come across - no song ever rises above the level of "pretty good pop song" - but it's utterly fascinating.

It opens with their big single, "Trouble", which is a pretty typical pop song - a danceable drum loop and bass line, a catchy repetitive guitar hook, and a couple of teenage girls singing about how their parents will be angry with them for staying out all night. On the other hand, they're yelling the verses in true punk form, and this contrast drives the interesting bits of the album. Sometimes Shampoo wears the girlpop celebrity hat, such as in the completely over-the-top "Viva La Megababes", or "Shampoo You", both about just how fantastic and famous Shampoo is. Other times, they skewer the very pop culture they are embodying: "Dirty Old Love Song" talks about overproduced pop songs - "They're big and bland but they spent four hundred grand/ On the video." - and "Skinny White Thing" is not kind to its titular androgynous beautiful person. This is when they're not just singing veiled sexual lyrics ("Delicious", "Me Hostage"). Then there's the extremely out-of-place "war is bad and we should all get along" spiel of "House of Love", and "Glimmer Globe", which appears to be a post-apocalyptic song about a disco ball, because, again, none of this makes sense.

So, overall, a bit of a curate's egg. Overproduced, catchy songs at best, and several surprises in the lyrics and the attitude, but it's hard to believe, much as I would like to, that this is a completely self-aware parody of 90s culture rather than another couple of teenage girls trying and failing to make it big. Most likely, both things are going on here, but the album remains interesting and unique. For what I think is a purer take on the Shampoo quintessence, try "Bouffant Headbutt", an earlier single which includes the lines "The way you act is such a disgrace/ Now you'll feel a bouffant in your face" and "When we get you outside/ You're fucking dead." Never have I been so intimidated by a 60s haircut.

Also, an official Power Rangers music video was made for "Trouble". At this point, the only conclusion I can draw is that whatever shadowy cabal secretly controls the world has a really weird sense of humor.

Next week on Handful of Dust! The pretentious hipster bullshit of Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal, and my extremely authoritative take on the world in general! Also maybe I will not separate the subjects and predicates of sentences with absurdly lengthy parentheticals!

The Dionysian Individual in his Natural Habitat

I've always found tweed vaguely erotic.

A grey tweed jacket on a woman implies intellectualism, and more importantly, an absurd gravity, a taking-oneself-too-seriously, reading Nabokov wide-eyed, gasping occasionally at particularly daring turns of phrase - the sort of cultured, ridiculous, sincere naïf who would use words like "naïf". Which for some reason really appeals to me. Romantics always do, I think because I tend to think of myself as a romantic wearing the skin of sardonic realism until I actually interact with a romantic, at which point I realize that the realism goes much deeper than the romanticism. I fundamentally do not take myself seriously - that's realism.

Don't believe in continuity of self except as a useful fiction, like free will, or (in my more cynical moments) love. I deny anything other than an accidental, superficial connection with who I was five years ago. I mutate in response to my environment, shifting to meet new matrices and situations.

If you've ever played Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, you may know what I mean when I speak of the Dionysian Hero. If you haven't played it (and you should - it's a beautiful game. Also there is a UFO abduction in a rural medieval-ish setting), all you really need to know is that the hero of the game, Link, must save a world he finds himself in entirely by accident, a world he has no connection to. He must do so by acquiring and using a variety of masks, some of which actually change his physical form entirely, allowing him to assume the roles of various specific individuals. Essentially, he is a blank slate which those around him overwrite to fit him into their individual stories. He's only the hero at all because the world needs a hero, and overwrites him to fit. And even his role as hero is taken away when the Big Bad of the story gets a chance to overwrite him - with another mask - as the ultimate villain.

Point is, I'm Dionysian. And that's weird, I think, because most people seem to think of themselves as Apollonian: they have themselves, and they attempt to shape the world around them in some small way to change it to what they want it to be. I do just the opposite: I have the world, and it shapes me. I don't think I'm all that different from other people, nor do I think that I am right about human nature and they are wrong: I think that both the Dionysian and Apollonian perspectives are legitimate lenses for viewing human nature. I just happen to use the Dionysian one where most seem to prefer the Apollonian. It works out well for me, I think. If I am whoever I am needed to be by those around me, it allows for smooth interactions, and closer friendships than I think I would have otherwise.

"What about personal integrity?" you might ask. "How can you switch between different social circles, particularly ones with conflicting views of reality without massive cognitive dissonance?" That's a remarkably apt question, actually. It's almost like you're a second-person interrogative projection of myself. The answer is that, yeah, it's weird when different circles of friends clash. Reality kind of goes all wavy. But I mean, this is obviously a very strong statement of what I feel like. In reality, of course, I do have some apparent invariants. I'm pretty consistently an atheist wannabe writer, for instance. But I feel like even these are (in theory and given extraordinary circumstances so don't hold your breath) negotiable.

And I was going to talk about Beck's The Information and Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? because they're pretty good examples of people taking themselves too seriously or something but I don't feel like it now so I'll do that later.

The title of this blogpost is blogpost.

Eschewing juvenile styles and outgrown beliefs we move forward. Also I'm sick of looking at that last blogpost.

I feel like this is me actually starting this blog, so I'll introduce it and me. I am a second-year at the University of Chicago. I'm undeclared as yet, was going to be an English major, but then I decided to write a BA on Novalis which means I'm going to be a Comparative Lit major or something like that. Which means I need to teach myself German over the summer. Which is intense.

Grew up young-earth creationist in Arkansas. I don't recommend it. Kicked around charismatic evangelical Christianity for a long time, until I realized that none of it had ever made sense to me, and that I'd manufactured all the warm fuzzy Jesus feelings. So now I'm an atheist, and that, my friends, has simplified my life wonderfully. Guess I'll talk about that more later.

I am surrounded by exceptional people, to whom I talk about (lately) literature, ethics, and philosophy of science. I'm in charge of the fiction selections for one of the literature magazines on campus (it's called euphony and it's actually pretty legit. I think I've got a book review of Umberto Eco somewhere on that site.)

As for this blog, it's about music, literature, film, and so forth. Used to have theology instead of film, but you understand why that changed. My music tastes are omnivorous and ever-expanding, but I plan to review Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer? and Demon Days by Gorillaz in future blogposts. Maybe Air's Moon Safari as well. Oh and Steven Wilson's Insurgentes. Lots of stuff, is my point. In terms of genres, classic rock, progressive rock, progressive metal, eighties synthpop, eighties punk, folk rock, and pretentious indie bullshit cover it pretty well.

As far as literature goes, I'm weirdly limited to mostly 20th-century novels, but a lot of those (GK Chesterton, Italo Calvino, Hemingway, James Joyce, Nabokov, Umberto Eco is a good list). Theoretically, I like sci-fi. In practice, usually not so much. I care less about fantasy, but therefore have lower standards for it and so probably enjoy most of it more? I tend to dislike most poetry not written by TS Eliot, and almost nothing before 1900.

Film is much more haphazard. Pretty sure Blade Runner is the greatest movie ever, with maybe Pan's Labyrinth in second place. Visuals are important - plots can be vague and still work, but a beautiful detailed world makes a lot of films great.

The rest is pretty much whatever I feel like. Perhaps this will include me talking about coming out to one's (fundamentalist evangelical Christian) family as an atheist. Perhaps it will include good conversations I have with exceptional people. Who knows? The possibilities are Literally Endless.

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.