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"Hi-Ho God-Damn Silver"
2001-12-07 01:41:25
If you recognize that quote, you already know what I'm going to talk about.
For those that don't, beware, minor spoilers ahead.
I hate to tell you this KZ, but it has officially come out now. The first issue of Frank Miller's triumphant return to the story of the Dark Knight came out this week, and I wanna rave about it for a bit.
The first thing you think when you open the book will be "oh yeah, I remember all the little television segments from 'The Dark Knight Returns'". Your response to the first hero you see will be "Who the hell is that?" (They don't identify him for several pages.) Your response to the SECOND hero you see will be "Who the hell is that...and why are her EARS so big?" (Apparently this version has decided to model herself after a serval.) Then you'll be disgusted by the, frankly, silly design of the good guys' costumes. Then, around page 38-44 or so, everything starts falling into place, and you start remembering what it was you liked about the old Dark Knight series, even though he hasn't even put in an appearance yet. Then you're all the way back, 20 pages from the end of "The Dark Knight Returns," again. Yeah, you know what that means. And on the last page of the issue, Batman gets one of the coolest lines ever. This looks like it could be good.
Oh yeah, one more thing.
Oliver Queen is back.
"Hi-ho God-damn Silver." -
This is a test of the heart. One, two, three, four, five....five, four...three, two, one.
2001-12-05 02:26:18
I was more than a little stunned at the number of people who put replies to my little meandering narrative in their journals yesterday, especially considering how sucky my grammar and spelling were. I'm always under the impression that these little gems I happen upon have been hidden away from the view of the rest of the world. Take the subject line above.
I tripped over this little piece of strangeness completely by accident about a year ago. If you live in the Atlanta area, the next time you're downtown, turn on your radio to 530 AM and listen closely. This is just about off the bottom of the AM band, so some radios won't even go down this far. What you might hear is the sequence above repeated over and over and over again. The signal isn't very strong, so there's a lot of static, and it disappears quickly once you leave the city limits, but it's a clear, distinct voice speaking that same line for hours at a time. Nothing else ever comes on the channel, and the sequence only runs for a few hours every day. I have heard some explanations for it, but none have really satisfied me, and none can explain the "This is a test of the heart" part at all. Every once in a while, when I'm disgusted with everything else on the radio, I'll turn that on and use it as a mantra for relaxation. Remember, truth is stranger than fiction...because fiction has to make sense.
'Couple of direct replies that I negelected before (not having spotted the reply before the last post)
Kusoyaro: Yeah man! You tell 'em! Ulead all the way! W00T!! Ulead R0XX0rS! (*Kidding*) Seriously, it's nice to see that I'm not the only one to have resisted giving in to the tyrrany (and expense) of Premier.
EK: I missed the musical portion of this last "Prairie Home Companion," so I don't really follow what you were talking about. To be honest, I've never actually managed to catch the beginning of the show. Never remembering when it airs, I just count myself fortunate when I happen to be on the road and flipping stations at the appropriate time.
Re: Artistic Slump. Wish I had some clever advice for you, but frankly, if YOU can't figure a way out of creative slumps, I'm not going to be much help. The only method I've ever found that worked was to sit in front of the computer, close my eyes, and begin typing without a thought in my head. Got a couple of my best stories out that way (although re-writing them after one hand got shifted on the keyboard was rather challenging). 'Fraid I have no ideal how to convert that method to other mediums, though.
Also, the thing Harper was talking about was the AMV.org contest. The database is hooked up to automatically tell you if you have any videos that meet the requirements (check the link on the main page) but you have to go into your profile and click the box that says "all videos entered."
fellowhoodlum: Glad I could bring back some memories. I'm willing to bet it is the weather. :) That radio show airs all over the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some web-broadcasts of the show lurking around for download. Might want to check them out.
GreyDuck: Actually, I'm one of the few people in any of my social circles that's rather sorry to see "goth" go. Of course, I have no love of the far-end idiocy at club scenes, the revival of the Wiccan religon by kids trying to piss off their parents, the faux-angsty overdepression required of "gothic" art, or the "underground" (pshaw) BDS&M "connection" fostered through a kind of guilt by association. (Man that's a lot of apostrophes.) For all it's failings, though, the least that can be said is that "goth" started as a literate pop culture trend. When was the last time there was one of those? At least at the start, they tended to be better read, and better read in areas I happen to like. I LIKE victorian ghost stories, antique myths, and musty old books. E.A.Poe, HPL, Mervyn Peake, Franz Kafka, Dante, Nietzsche, and Lewis Carrol (warped in interpretation, yeah, but still) are all some of my favorite authors, and I enjoyed the revival they suffered through "gothdom." (Ann Rice ran out of interesting material by the second book, Vampires are boring, clumsy metaphores for sex, and Vampire LARPS have to qualify as the single most annoying hobby I've ever seen.) The attempt to inject something resembling aesthetic quality into horror films led to a handful of very good films....and a lot of artsy crap, but no one's forcing me to watch the crap. It's also added something of a fresh perspective to a genre in danger of degenerating entirely into Friday the 13th remakes. Horror writing got a similar accelleration, with similar results.
Now we get "Scream 3." wooo hooo.
I've always considered it a supreme bit of irony that a trend begun by and for the outcasts, the bookish, and the social misfits somehow attracted the fetishists and fasion designers and transformed from the freaky loner outcast nerd in high-school to supermodels in skintight black latex and high heels. I always wondered if there came an offical day of THE ANNOUNCEMENT. "I'm sorry, you're not cool enough to be considered an outcast anymore." Anyway, I was never actually a goth, and thus there are plenty of other people much better at dilineating this exactly than me. Like Johnen Vasquez. Despite the fact that he rips the "gothic" crowd a new one at every opportunity, anyone who doesn't think "Johnny the Homicidal Maniac," "I Feel Sick," "Squee," and even "Zim" (look carefully at Gaz...it's pretty obvious who she grows up to be) are "gothic" haven't been paying attention. To borrow from another waning trend, Johnen is Goth as FUCK!!!! (Hmm...now there's a title for a comic book....) -
"But I don't wish to go among mad people" said Alice
2001-12-03 11:23:42
Coderjoe: Not exactly. All of a sudden, the show decided to equate magic with drugs, suddenly making it something you could pick up a dose of the "strong stuff" in a back alley from a seedy-looking warlock after being brought there by your morally-questionable friend. Then, of course, you gotta go back to get another hit and due to lost time end up wandering the streets late at night. Add the happy-bouncy high and the delirium tremens when you stop doing magic (and the lines "Willow understands, she would want me to have this stuff" (sage)) and voila! Willow's been a drug addict all along, we just never noticed. They painted hard and fast with a very wide brush in a single episode. Bleh.
Kusoyaro: The first Harry Potter book was not the best written of the four out so far. Kinda stitched together at the seams, in my opinion. Later books read much better, like an epic-length Roald Dahl. Might want to try the next book in the series if you have the time.
I just got ten hits in two minutes on my journal. Holy frickin' cow!
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And that's the news from lake Woebegone...
2001-12-03 10:47:47
(Please excuse spelling mistakes, I haven't the energy or time to go through correcting them.)
There's a radio show on the public radio station here in Atlanta that feels completely out of place. It runs sometime on Sunday afternoons, and the show is called "The Prarie Home Companion". It's a rather sedate contemplative comedy show with only about six or seven speakers and musical guests from the folk circuit. About eight months ago I caught a show where the featured musical guest was the singer for "Oh Death" from "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?"; that should give you an idea of the type of music to be encountered in the show. Anyway, the reason this show sounds particularly alien playing in a Georgia broadcasting station is because of a regular sort of sentimental comedy segment they run every show called "the news from Lake Woebegone," a fictitious string of small-town events read out in complete deadpan that, while being about events in the current day and age, sounds like they could be happening thirty, fifty, or even seventy years ago. The show speaks specifically to the large population of Scandanavian (mostly Norweigen) decendents that densely populate the northernmost areas of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. This is a population that has, for the most part, slipped under the cultural radar of most people. Most people consider the far north to be a hopeless mish-mash of cultural zones that have long since been bred into a homogenous lump with no true cultural identity or ancestral pride, until, of course, you cross over into Canada, where everything becomes hopelessly...well...FRENCH! (No offense to Canadians, I'm saying this is what OTHER people think.) This attitude suits the Norweigens population just fine, as staying out of the way and not wanting to put anyone to any trouble is something of a virtue to them. Stoicisim is an admired trait as well, although admiration is not a readily shown. My Grandfather on my mother's side was Norweigen, and the talk in this show of the Lutheran churches, lefsa and krumkaka preparation, and especially the lutefisk dinners at Christmas always puts me in mind of him. (If you don't know what lutefisk is, stay away from it. The only people in the world who still eat this stuff are Norweigen Americans, and the rest of the civilized world regards it with the same sort of abject horror given the eating of chilled monkey brains. "Fish jello" is the most complimentary discription I've ever heard for it.) He was fiercely proud of his heritage, and jokingly used to tell me that anyone with a drop of Norweigen blood in them couldn't help but be entirely Norweigen. (I'm a little under 1/4.) He died a few years ago shortly after Christmas of a malignant brain tumor, and went out a paragon of Norweigen virtue. He wouldn't want me troubling anyone else with his problems, so that's all I'll say on the matter.
Anyway, the show has this sort of meandering narrative filled with the arid Norweigen humor that seems so...well...boring to anyone unfamiliar with the bitterly cold, intermidably long northern winters and the unshakably stoic nature of these northerners. (A line from the show speaks about the rows of gifts at the local drug store: "...and little leather-bound diaries with a lock. Imagine that...a life so interesting that you have to stop other people from reading about it...") It reminds me of a more sedated Lileks (www.lileks.com , check the "daily bleat" section) only more "small town." Amid all of the meandering, however, the show occasionally manages to be startlingly profound, and the show I heard this weekend caught me off guard with the statment "...but then, art has never come from contented people." This is actually a statment I've been trying to disprove for some time now, as it belongs to a family of sayings that I always objected to. "You can't be a real artist if you haven't suffered." "You can't REALLY understand this abstract concept if you haven't gotten high." In my experience, this line of thought always peters off in the angsty direction of "you can't understand my pain" that killed the "goth" movement in a cloud of ridicule. (The progression from romantic victorian revivalism to "pity poor me, I have an 'alternative' lifestyle" club scene must chalk up to one of the oddest popular movements ever.) However, this line from the show seems to me to be the best clarification and summary of all those stupid artistic condescentions that "suffering artists" have been spewing for the last half century. Contentment rarely leads to the creation of anything significant. Perhaps we create out of envy for a more exciting, dramatic, fantastical, or romantic life we see playing on the screen before us. Then again, maybe not.
As a reward for everyone who read through that great wandering post...the AMV compillation tapes have come in! They are presently sitting at the distributor's awaiting ya'lls SASE and blank tape arrivals. Be warned, there are two tapes, so measure your postage appropriately. The distributor is the long-time standby C-ko at http://home.cfl.rr.com/kyoto/cko/
He plans on shutting down for two weeks in December, so I wouldn't count on getting them before Christmas, but you can give it a shot.
The title-line is the regular signoff of the segment I described to you. the full bit goes like this: "And that's the news from Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."
P.S.
My Family's reasoning behind the settling of the northern states with so many Scandanavians goes like this: all the Scandanavian immigrants hit the Newfoundland coast and began working their way inward and Southward. Once they hit Wisconsin they had reached the warmest land any of them had ever seen, and, deciding that it couldn't get any better than this, settled down there and became farmers. (If you've ever spent the winter in Wisconsin, you understand why this is funny.) -
I can stand the sight of worms, and looks at microscopic germs.....
2001-11-29 18:16:40
Whoops, forgot a point or two. I do relate music to something other than driving. Taking tests! Every time I take a test, I get some song stuck in my head that just runs over and over and over while I'm trying to concentrate. I discovered while taking my qualifier that I could actually choose which song to get stuck in there (Werewolves of London). The SECOND time I took the qualifier, I made no such effort. Passed it that time.
Ya really want to freak yourself out? While driving with the radio on, watch streetlights very closely. They change in sync with the music. If you concentrate very hard, you can make them change one beat sooner than they would otherwise. :)
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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