Tuesday, July 17, 2007

My life is not entirely dissimilar from a cosmonaut living on the International Space Station in that I now rely on scheduled deliveries of items formerly available within thirty miles of my front door. In fact, this may be the first time I've lived in a town lacking both a comic shop and a music store. No small wonder everyone's married here; there are no geek vices to keep them celibate.

My first of doubtless many Amazon.com orders arrived yesterday. The box size was a little misleading until I opened it to discover the special edition Smashing Pumpkins CD I ordered came with a larger booklet than I expected. The other item was the British import Tarantula single, paid in full primarily for one b-side, "Death from Above." Both CDs are great, in my estimation, but I'm an unabashed fanboy and it's been several years between albums.

Zeitgeist sounds like a continuation of Machina, if maybe a bit simpler. Machina served to announce the band breaking up, hence the heavy apocalyptic and death-of-rock themes. Seven years later, things are looking up. Zeitgeist responds to the previous album's despondency with a sort of cheerful rebellion- kind of a cockeyed smile and a middle finger to "The Man." Here, "The Man" has shifted from a passive corporate blob to the more modern all-war-all-news-all-for-sale, all for self-perpetuity blob. Back when "alternative" meant "not completely co-opted yet," rebellion against the status quo left over from the Regan years meant passivity and disillusionment. (Which I, for my part, did all I could to buy in to as a teenager even though I was pretty happy and probably more a part of the establishment than I cared to admit.) Now, this "Man" relies on passivity of any stripe, which most of what passes for rock in the mainstream is happy to propagate. It's always the aging rock stars who remind us why rock should be better than that- Ozzy, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, and now it would seem the torch is passed to Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlain, and whoever else they can rope into their crazy rock circus long enough to go on tour. I doubt most current bands will change with society in the coming years as we hopefully move out of the terror decade. If anyone will hear the old guys and take up their cause, it's the kids practicing on starter gear in garages and basements as an escape from the current status quo.

So, yeah, I like the album.

In other news, my comics are shipping weekly now, and the next box just went out this morning according to my e-mail.

Monday, July 09, 2007

(spoilers ahead for anyone who has never seen a summer blockbuster)
This past weekend was my first chance to sit and relax after a week of moving, work, and unpacking. Not that I actually relaxed, but I had the chance. I saw Transformers on Saturday, which would seem like a leisure activity, though it ended up being wildly confusing. Once you get past all the giant robot action, it turns out to be a movie about various people and how they are effected by a handful of transforming robots. Like Magnolia, only I don't care. Here is the movie, boiled down and without all the cool CGI:

  • Optimus Prime gives a nice cosmic NPR narration on the beginning of life for living machines. We assume this could only have happened exactly 10,000 Earth years ago.
  • Michael Bay's stock red-blooded American army guys are introduced through their suitably ethnic banter: The white dude has a wife back home and a daughter that he seems confident is his, though the movie doesn't factor in stop-loss in telling us when exactly he would have been in procreation proximity with his wife. The black dude is inoffensively competent, a good soldier, no more or less equal than his absolutely equal buddies. The Latino dude talks a lot. The odd fellow in the glasses is there to balance the weight on his side of the helicopter.
  • A Decepticon lands on a military base, transforms with a series of slack-jawed reaction shots, and then just sort of strolls around like a golfer on a putting green, off-handedly blowing things up.
  • The only soldiers to escape are our previously introduced platoon, the Fightin' Relatables. They are attacked by a Decepticon that burrows in the sand and attacks as a giant scorpion. You don't screw with a Decepticon that doesn't feel the need to turn into anything.
  • Bay assumes we have had just about enough of this giant robot nonsense for now, so we are taken to sunny California to meet Sam, a boy who lucks into driving a car that can get anywhere in Los Angeles in five minutes through only the lightest traffic. Sam also repeatedly mentions his great grandpa who, in Da Vinci Code-style flashback, did something in the Arctic where he stumbled on a thoroughly frozen Megatron. No word on whether or not he ran into the expedition from H.P. Lovecraft's novella "At the Mountains of Madness." And just for kicks, we meet Sam's perfunctory romantic interest.
  • Smash-action cut to somewhere in Washington DC where John Voight is speaking to a group of teenagers about computer security jobs. The world of the movie is run by children- the bureaucrats are just there to observe and be flabbergasted when the kids come up with solutions to problems. One of the kids present is the guy who played Nerd of Doom Andrew on Buffy. He disappears into some other movie we don't get to see where most of this plot prattle is edited out in favor of giant robot action, or so I like to believe. In his stead, we get a British runway model that the movie proclaims to be a genius programmer. Her partner in crime amidst all of the flashy glowing computer displays and "hacking" is the dude from Kangaroo Jack.
  • More with Sam and his car and other things that don't involve lasers and mass destruction.
  • Group introduction with the Autobots! They explain how they learned to talk from the internet, which makes some sense, as they only speak English- they couldn't get past the Great Firewall of China. Thanks, Google and Yahoo.
  • More action, Bumblebee takes a cheapshot from some government agents, the entire plot is picked up and moved to the Hoover Dam for a while.
  • Something important enough to bring all of the plot threads and characters together happens, Megatron wakes up in a mood similar to John Wayne in Dennis Leary's song "I'm an Asshole" ("Have you ever taken a cold shower? Well, multiply that by 15 million times, that's how pissed off The Duke's gonna be"), the Decepticons assemble and start actively tearing things up. Good hustle, fellas.
  • One of the producers checks the title of the movie, remembers what all this is about, and gives the audience what it deserves by virtue of paying admission: all-out giant robot action. Big jumbled masses of motion-blurred CGI metal rolling around and blowing up, occasionally standing up to look like something other than a ball of parts. Then back to the blurriness.
  • The good guys win, Sam gets the girl and a bunch of clingy Autobot buddies, the soldiers from the beginning mostly disappear, and Optimus Prime concludes the proceedings by assuring his cohorts that humans are a-o.k.

Thursday, July 05, 2007


This song would have fit right in on Machina II, matching the "what the hell is this frantic fuzzy noise that I must hear over and over again?" vibe. This new Tarantula video reminds me of the Cherub Rock video- lots of filters and nonsense going on but fifteen years later. The Cherub Rock video was shot on film in the woods, then deliberately processed wrong, bleached, and thrown down the stairs. This new video has the same feel, but with digital filters.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

My new apartment is a mess of boxes and bags, but I'm adjusting pretty well to this new town and new job. My office is smallish, but nice, with a window with a nice view of a tree and an old church. This week is going o be slow for me while I get acclimated. I'm waiting for the HR office to process my paperwork so I can get my new e-mail address and parking pass.

My new machine is an iMac (lowercase "i" implies divinity) is currently looming before me on the desk. The help desk sent over their tech lackeys to install Final Cut Pro and the rest of the Production Studio 2 bundle. If the computer could reach it's own keyboard it could do my job without me.