A lot of JLA and JSA today....

After prematurely waking up at around 1:00 pm earlier today, I first took a shower because I failed to do so the previous night. Then, my brother and I decided to grab a little bite to eat at our usual favorite substandard Chinese restaurant. The food was better than usual, putting the meal on par with your typical Big Mac. Thus, I was relatively elated. After coming back home around 3:00 am and downing a coke, I decided to start reading some comics... and I kept on reading until around 1:00 am. I don't believe I've ever read so much in one day.

About two weeks ago, I finally purchased the second volume of Geoff Johns' and Dale Eaglesham's critically acclaimed run on JSA, Thy Kingdom Come. Thus, I felt it was time for me to get reacquainted with the goings-on of the DC universe. The last major comic I read that dealt with continuity was 52 and that was a while ago. To catch up, I decided to read both trades of Meltzer's JLA, The Tornado's Path and The Lightning Saga (which was interspliced with two issues of Johns' JSA) and both of Johns' JSA volumes, The Next Age and the afore-mentioned Thy Kingdom Come. I have to say, unfortunately, that my overall opinion was one of relative disappointment, which saddens me a little. I loved Meltzer's Identity Crisis and Johns' Green Lantern: Rebirth, but for some reason, these mainstream, ongoing titles just aren't doing it for me anymore. They just seem to lack the originality and inventiveness that keeps the titles fresh. Perhaps my obsession with superheroes has weakened, but I don't think that's necessarily it. Maybe my standards of good writing have just raised. For example, I still find All Star Superman breathtakingly beautiful. Why is that? Even though Dale Eaglesham and Ed Benes are both extremely proficient artists, I don't feel that they're anything special. On the other hand, the old art of Frank Miller spoke to my feelings and thoughts in a way that were special and unique, maybe a sign of his genius. Just something to think about.

Particular songs that I've been listening to recently...

Just a small list of really good songs....

Big Star - Blue Moon
This short little ballad comes off of their masterful "Third/Sister Lovers" album and is one of the most beautiful songs in the world. The interplay between the instruments is gorgeous and Alex Chilton's mournful longing is always splendid.

Billy Joel - Vienna
Somehow, Vienna is EXACTLY what I think about when listening to this song, even though the lyrics really have nothing to do with the city of Vienna. Another beautiful ballad.

Feist - Brandy Alexander
This is one sexy ballad, filled with seductive phrasing and disarming purrs. The spare arrangement sets the mood perfectly. Oh, and its lyrically fantastic, showing Ms. Feist's skill as a writer to be quite capable.

The Shins - Girl on the Wing
Although I really like just about every song on "Oh, Inverted World," (though I do tend to skip "Your Algebra") I think I've grown to like this one the most. It's strange, not as immediately appetizing as "New Slang," not as formally perfect as "Saint Simon," and not as rocking as "Girl Inform Me," but there is a magical sense to it, especially in the soaring melody of the chorus. I love it.

T.I. - What You Know
That epic riff just straight up ROCKS!

Guided by Voices - Game of Pricks
Although no song on "Alien Lanes" is really a complete "song" (in the normal sense). They're all fragments. This little bit of delight just happens to be my favorite of those fragments.

Weezer - Undone-The Sweater Song
Great piece of indie rock. The acidic riff really drills, and the lyrics are fucking hilarious.

The Replacements - Here Comes a Regular
Paul Westerberg has written TONS of great songs, but I think this just might be his best ballad.... maybe. Gorgeous melody, great lyrics, wistful vocals, and beautiful, beautiful strings.

The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
This just might be the greatest song of all time. It's arguable.

The Stone Roses - (Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister
I love this song. In fact, I love this entire album. How did they produce this thing and make it sound so seductive, distant, close, epic, intimate, beautiful, and so damn rocking, and all at the same time? There was no way they could do it two times in a row, so their failure was almost inevitable.

Well, there's a short list. Obviously, there will be much more recommendations to come.

An analysis of fear....

I just finished reading The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs, supposedly one of the most famous horror stories of all time. Without a doubt, it is the creepiest I've ever experienced. As stated before, I've only recently begun the habit of consistent, habitual reading and have thus only really been exposed to horror stories in the realm of film. The scariest, creepiest film that I've seen is probably Les Diaboliques by Henri-Georges Clouzot, a masterpiece of psychological horror and (I think) an acknowledged precursor to Hitchcock's Psycho. However, the terrified and chilled state I was left in after finishing Jacobs' short story--I was literally afraid to look outside my windows--prompted me to immediately ponder on the interesting qualities of horror fiction; specifically, what makes this particular type of entertainment work?

I've come to the conclusion that what's truly scary in a story is what's suggested, as opposed to what's seen. This is why most horror films don't work, especially modern movies that rely on sudden camera jerks or sound effects to jolt the audience (what the audience feels from this is mere temporal excitement, not true fear, the kind that rests in your bones long after you've finished the story). Both Alien and Jaws are two classic examples of horror filmmaking that work specifically because they suggest a large, vicious-looking alien and a malevolent shark. You almost never actually see them on-screen. This works because what the director suggests, the audience then takes and shapes into his or her own nightmare. After all, we don't all fear the same thing. This is also why I feel horror fiction works better in literature than in film because in film there is an extremely strong temptation to show the thing causing the fear, thus ruining the effect. In literature, its ALL suggestion; you never actually see the thing causing the fear, even when the characters in the story do! Thus, you still interpret the horror being suggested and, if it is written well, it is indeed very, very scary. So... read The Monkey's Paw, which is an absolute masterpiece of scary storytelling, as far as I'm concerned.

Joseph Wambaugh....

I'm relatively disappointed right now. I just finished The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh. It was a wonderful book, filled with pure storytelling, some of the most blissfully entertaining that I've ever read. Why would one be disappointed then, especially after such a thrilling experience? Well, I'm in a special situation. See, my copy of the The Delta Star is signed by Mr. Wambaugh and he gave the book to me for free. You see, he taught Screenwriting for the Theatre Department at UCSD as a guest lecturer, and I took that class. However, at the time, I had NO idea who he was, no clue that he was the legendary master of the police procedural, author of the critically acclaimed masterpiece, The Choirboys. Thus, I had no real appreciation for him and his lectures. He seemed like a nice enough guy, funny too, but apparently I'd rather lay in bed instead of attend the 9 am class. Ah.. the foolishness of youth. I ended up getting a C in that class because I ditched many of the mandatory lectures. At the time, I just didn't care. Now I realize that I wasted an amazing opportunity to learn from a master. See, I'm so disappointed right now because I wanted to e-mail him and tell him just how great his book was, but I can't find the e-mail address! And, I can't find it on google either! I actually had his personal e-mail address because he gave it out to everyone in the class. Thus, I am, as they say, out of luck and low on spirit. Oh well, the only thing I can do now is buy my copy of the The Choirboys and read that one, too. More likely than not, that should cheer me up again.

Lester Bangs...

It's interesting sometimes how inspiration just lurks around most of the time, waiting for the correct moment to strike at you. Most of the time you never see it coming, and then boom, its there.

Here's an example: I woke up earlier around 4 am today because I slept around midnight when I normally go to bed around... 4 am. I tried going back to sleep, but it just wasn't working out so I decided to stay up and listen to a little bit of music. I played a few random songs here and there, you know, music that I had heard before and knew I would still like. I don't really feel that early in the morning is the best time for sampling new stuff, when I'm not really awake enough to give a fair listen. After a few songs, I felt like maybe I should start reading something, maybe the book that I'm currently reading at the time. Instead however, I decided to be a little more adventurous than usual and played some more music, this time an entire album, one of my favorite albums actually, Astral Weeks. This is an album that I truly love to death, though I don't play it much at all--in fact, I've probably listened through the entire album ten times in my life?--because I can't handle that much emotional battering that often. It doesn't go down nearly as easily or as smoothly as A Hard Day's Night, let's say. Its such transportational music that it requires a lot of emotional effort from me to fully enjoy. Anyways, after Slim Slow Slider finished, thus ending my musical (spiritual?) journey, I realized that I still love that album, really love it, the kind of love you can't really articulate.

Then, I remembered reading somewhere--I really wish I could remember where just so I could thank the individual--that there was this really profound and masterful "review" written about Van's album by some dude named Lester Bangs, some famous rock critic apparently. In fact, I remember reading that it was its own kind of masterpiece. Before I looked up that article, I first did a little research on the Lester himself and realized that "famous" doesn't really begin to sum up, to do justice to Mr. Bang's legacy. He was a rock critic that really changed the voice of music criticism. In fact, I've NEVER read a critic that "spoke" like Lester does; he's at once personal and distant, writing a mesmerizing poetic prose that explains as much as it enchants. And sometimes it doesn't explain at all, just enchants. He prefers it that way, explaining, "I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette." Wow. Who writes like that, much less a critic? Not that there's anything wrong with Aeschylus, of course.

Try and (in)take this next bit from that ridiculous article on Astral Weeks,

"Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt."

How beautiful that is, how glorious an ode!

Now, two things: First, do yourself a favor and read this ridiculous article in its entirety (You can actually do yourself a second favor by listening to the album itself. In fact, you should do that before reading the article; it would only make sense). Second, I just wanted to point out that Mr. Bangs is really inspirational to me personally because, as a writer, I'm not so good with vocabulary, and although Bangs has extremely good vocabulary himself, I don't think that's what makes him special. It's his immediacy, his energy, his ridiculous vitality, his passion, his absolute love for what he writes about, and his utter insanity, and all of that comes through when I read his work even though I don't really know what he's talking about half of the time, much less the definitions of a lot of his word choices. This is critical writing released from the shackles of demarcation and tradition, what Michael Dirda called "the critic as hedonist." Obviously, his writing is going to influence my writing. I think it already has a little bit. I don't know. Maybe. Either way, I'm glad to have discovered Lester Bangs, and I will most definitely be buying one of his anthologies very soon.

Reading.....

I've been doing a lot more reading recently, which is definitely a good thing, especially since I want to become a better writer. The funny thing is I used to almost never read at all. It was much too boring, I thought. In fact, throughout all of elementary, junior high, and high school, I'm pretty sure I only read three books out of the entire catalog of required reading, those three being The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird, and I have to say I liked all three quite a bit.

However, once in a while, I get this burning desire to challenge myself a little. I'm pretty sure you all know the feeling. It's the feeling you get when your life has inevitably become a little too mundane and routine. You just wake up one morning and think to yourself, "Hey, why don't I start reading Ulysses? I heard its not bad." However, this particular morning never occurred for me. Rather, my road to the palace of words was a lot more roundabout and... long.

I want to work in movies. In fact, I have wanted to work in movies ever since I first saw Casablanca (or, rather, after I viewed it for the second time because only then did I fully appreciate its beauty and perfection). However, I did not always want to work in movies. Originally, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Big surprise. One day, though, my mom decided to bring home a brand new DVD player. Very nice. Unfortunately however, we had no working DVDs. Naturally, this meant that we needed some. At the time, I was a little bit infatuated with a rather voluptuous blonde by the name of Marilyn Monroe. I caught a glimpse of a documentary about her on TCM one night, and, after about ten hypnotizing minutes of viewing, I immediately entered the immense legion of Marilyn Monroe fans. Ergo, when I found out that we had a new DVD player, I immediately drove off to the nearest Best Buy to purchase my first two DVDs (I now have a collection of over six hundred), The Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot.

I watched both films. The Seven Year Itch was only decent in my mind (I still have yet to rewatch the film, which is something I should do). However, Some Like it Hot absolutely BLEW ME AWAY... on first viewing! Up to that point, my favorite film was by far Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Clearly, my standards had yet to be raised. Some Like it Hot did it for me, though. For the first time in my life, I had experienced what I would now call a great work of art. Needless to say, I was really hooked. I rewatched the film maybe five more times, picking up more and more nuances with each viewing. I then researched as much trivia as I could about it, and realized that, not surprisingly, it was considered an all-time classic by many critics. Thus, a very profound thought occurred to me at the time: If Some Like it Hot is so good and is an all-time classic, won't other classics be just as good? To satisfy my curiosity, I began collecting more and more American classics by the dozen. I watched all of them and realized that I didn't like every single one as much as I did Some Like it Hot. There were a few, however, that became instant favorites (Casablanca and Singin' in the Rain, for example).

Then, I began to realize something else. The films that I seemed to like most tended to be extremely accessible. However, for some reason, a few of these supposed all time classics were a lot less approachable than something like Some Like it Hot, causing me to actually find them a little... boring. Yet, they were also considered a part of the canon. How could this be? Interestingly, I noticed this "symptom" most acutely in foreign classics, which seemed to almost use a different film language than the one used in American films (which, I later learned in film class, was actually exactly the case, at least among archetypal films). At this point, one of two things can occur. First, I could just dismiss the films as bad and claim that all of the critics in history are wrong for praising them. I'm pretty sure this is a relatively common argument. Or, I could choose to reexamine the films, putting my faith and trust in all of the people that have commended them in the past. A classic is not a classic because some old dude says it is, but rather because it is timeless and can always be experienced over and over again with greater appreciation. Thankfully, I adopted the second mindset (which does require some level of prudence, I admit), and that has made all the difference. I developed new favorites such as Citizen Kane and Kagemusha, both of which were films that I originally disliked. Great works of art almost always speak through the barrier of unfamiliarity if given enough time.

Now, being the curious and open-minded person that I am, I decided that I had watched too many movies, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all. Still though, I realized that there were other things to experience out there. So... I began collecting music. My process of collection was the exact same as with films. I started as a fan of a particular legend (in this case, Frank Sinatra) and went on to explore further musical horizons from there, repeatedly challenging myself along the way (with Japanese noise artists Merzbow and Masonna, no less).

Finally, I arrived at literature. See, at this point in my life, I had become a person that actually liked to challenge himself. I was never a fan of reading, so doing it would require a lot of patience. Thus, it was going to be a challenge, meaning I jumped into it immediately. That was four years ago. Now, I am a relatively fervent reader, but I still have a difficult time with it sometimes because reading requires a lot more focus than listening to music or watching a movie. This is because you can stop watching a film or listening to a song, but the film or song will still continue to roll. When you stop reading, the book stops. Thus, the reader is required to put in more effort than the watcher or the listener. This is a lesson that I am still learning because I tend to get distracted relatively easily, which is a little annoying sometimes. However, I am working on it and making progress. Because of this patience, I have experienced wonderful moments of what I like to call pure reading, when the words begin to slowly permeate the personality, to paraphrase Cyril Connolly.

I like to read a great many things. In fact, I tend to appreciate variety in all aspects of life. This is why my two favorite critics are Roger Ebert and Michael Dirda: Ebert for film and Dirda for literature. Not only are they both Pulitzer Prize winning writers, they are both extremely open-minded and maintain a strict adherence to variety in their selection of films and books. I try to do the same. Dirda, for example, will include and even juxtapose the works of Phillip K. Dick and Lucian in the same book. Ebert places Groundhog Day, Detour, and Ordet in his great films list. Talk about variety.

Oh, in case anyone has not noticed, I am an extremely tangential thinker, and consequently, writer. So, just because the title of the post signifies one subject, that does not mean that that is necessarily what I will be talking about. Anyways... till next time...

Inauguration day...

I've finally started a blog. I've been meaning to do this for quite some time now, but I never really acquired the necessary motivation to do so. Sure, the actual starting of the blog requires very little willpower, but I knew that if I was going to start one, I would also have to eventually start writing in it. Therein lies the problem. I tend to be hypercritical about my own writing and almost never end up actually liking it. Thus, when I begin to write something, I inevitably end up erasing it before its finished. I don't know, its a problem of mine. I'm sure many can relate. However, as you can see, I've decided to stop being a pussy and finally start one. Plus, I hear that there is a potential chance for me to actually make some money off this thing, so that's obviously exciting. Thus, I am now an official blogger. Fun.

So, what can you expect to find on my blog? Mostly my thoughts (big surprise), but hopefully these thoughts will at least be interesting because I do tend to think a lot, and not necessarily on the same frequency that most people (At least I've noticed this. Correct me if I'm wrong). I also love life and especially love to observe the interesting nuances of life, so there will definitely be, hopefully, a lot of insightful observations. Oh, and I also like to think of myself as a minor critic, so there will be tons of reviews on tons of different movies, books, food, etc.

So..... yeah, you'll be reading mostly about observations on life and reviews of different things, which will hopefully lead to more observations. And, just so you know, in contrast to many other blogs, there are specific things you will most likely not be reading on my blog. Mostly, you will not be reading about random rants and tirades about random things that piss me off. I also don't plan on using this blog as a place to vent about how horrible my ex-girlfriend was or how I hate my parents or any of that useless bullshit. I want this particular blog to actually be helpful, informative, educational, and, last but definitely not least, entertaining. I feel almost all writing should be entertaining at some level.

My one hope for this blog (besides acquiring actual readers outside of my good friends) is that it eventually helps to improve my writing. I feel that the best way to get better at something is to constantly work at it, so this this will hopefully help. We shall see.