Monthly Archive for March, 2009

TO Press Or Not To Press (THe issue of gayness in music and I don’t mean sexually)

Published on March 23, 2009 in ..The Dude. 1 Comment

It has recently come to my attention that the issue of the use of synthesizers in Rock n Roll is music’s version of the Roe V Wade debate.

Only more important.

When is it ok to use synths in a rock genre? Is it ever ok? DOes it’s use violate god’s natural order?

Good questions all. I myself have been split on this issue over the decades. I must admit that to some extent I have pushed the debate aside in my mind so as to not have to take sides.

But let’s look at an early example of the dilemma this has caused me. Van Halen was the group that saved me from the sugary emptiness of pop music. Until I heard Eddie’s guitar I was on my way to life in Hell listening to Michael Jackson and Duran Duran. BUt shortly after this all started out came Jump. Jump is of course all about Eddie dropping the guitar and pressing a lot of buttons on a machine. And David Lee Roth jumping low budgetly.

One could say by softening the sound at that early stage of my development it made a transition from gay music to grown up music more palatable. Sort of gateway keyboards if you will. But there has always been a part of me that can dig a good synth sound. Provided it’s timely. I dig The Cars. I love their sound. But are they the kind of band where synth judgements lose meaning. Dismissing them for their usage is like instantly dismissing Slayer because their lyrics can’t be understood.

It’s who they are. You either like that or not.

On the other hand, though it was who they were there can be little doubt that Europe (think heavy keyboards on FInal Countdown) were deserving of mocking. THeir music might even be said to be gay.

Now by gay I don’t mean for homosexuals or made by homosexuals. Gayness in the pop cultural sense  has other far deeper connotations. Sexual gayness is swell. A benefit to me even. Gayness in music, movies etc is another matter. That leads me to a subquestion of this debate. Does the use of keyboards in rock genres mean a song is gay.

Now I’m not inferring these are the most important questions of our time.

I’m saying it.

THese are the most important questions of our time.

Until we have fully dealt with this it will continue to haunt the national psyche as it has since the 80′s made gayness in music such a cliche we stopped even being able to recognize ironic gayness or full on gayness in music.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I have many gay friends and this is an issue for them as well. No American is left behind when it comes to the effects of keyboards in a rock song. THis is a topic worthy of fuller flushing out but I have to go to work now. Sometime in the next few minutes I will have to make a personal choice:

To listen to a ballad, straight on rock song, or a hybrid along the lines of Journey whose use of keyboards can be viewed as either groundbreaking or society destroying depending on your point of view. But I will deal with this choice head on.

Will you?

The Daily Blog (more or less)

Published on March 22, 2009 in ..The Dude. 0 Comments

Going to try and do a mostly daily update for once though no one is reading this. Just to get some writing chops together. or see if they are still there. By using the form of a daily accounting of my own and the cultures odds and ends hopefully it won’t be a strain to have a few things to say at least almost every day. THe big test will be if I can get to here on my cell (I haven’t been able to so far), because that will allow for posts from work or other locations since I don’t always have the opportunity after work and at home if I want to get some other things done.

So here goes:

We are two weeks from Baseball starting for real and I feel the usual sense of anticipation though mixed with dread. I truly think the Mets will suck, the Red Sox be mediocre and the Yankees run away with things. And I’m usually pretty good with this stuff. But not perfect so i hold out hope for my imperfections to do me some good for once. I have tickets for my first Citifield game May 29th. Looking forward to scoping out the new digs. Hope to get there early and just explore the structure, the stores, and the eateries. I’ll see if there’s any truth to the rumor the Mets will feature The Heimlich Club, as the parks spotlight new Mets themed restaurant.

Actually I started the rumor so it’s unlikely unless I can project things like a Cylon.

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Speaking of which, Battlestar Galactica is gone. sad to see the show go. THe finale will need time to formulate itself into something worthy of a more coherent judgement. Right now my feelings towards it are vague. ANd the show is at least partially to blame because they were vague in their denoument. Looks like ROn Moore and Dave Eick tried to please everyone from the ultra religious to atheists and all the majority of tweeners. Judging from internet reactions they didn’t do a great job of this though there are plenty of opinions covering the spectrum.

One thing I think they are all missing was the religious sentiment or lack thereof. Everyone seems to think it posed a clear god figure who is the Oz behind the curtain of the shows events. While I agree with those that say this was a cop out and the ultimate deux ex machina to explain so much by not explaining and instead attributing so much to some invisible being who sent us post death Starbuck and In-Head Baltar and Six, as well as sending Hera and all the coordinates to a new home through the gift of song.

When i look at it this way, well, it makes me want to unwatch 4 years of BSG. But as Futurama tells us, “you’ve watched it! You can’t unwatch it!”

But there is another angle not many are looking at. One that gives that vagueness for even those not into the religious p.o.v., which seems to be the greater part of BSG’s internet community who are not happy about resolving a science fiction show with religious constructs.

But at the end, in Times Square, Baltar does tell 6 (In Heads) that IT doesn’t like being called God. Six also makes a face clearly showing her somewhat at odds with the being, entity, or what have you, that Baltar is referring to. Considering her monotheistic background these two moments at the end seem to point to something else being Oz besides any normal views of God. So once you go there you’re back to enough vagueness for everyone to come away with a happy feeling unless they, you know, wanted some clear answers for their hours of viewership invested over 4 years.

For me, that vagueness allows me to wonder if Head Baltar’s God is a machine. Remember this has happened before and will happen again. It happened even before the BSG universe we know of. Maybe before the Final Five. What if we go back far enough and think they were seeded by a species just as our Earth was by Hera and hers? ANd so on and so on. THrow in Six’s speech about complex systems and all the technology warnings, and consider the idea of In-Head Angels, demons, ghosts, or whatever we think of them as within the context of a universe where that technology and complexity has led to uploading and downloading of consciousness into brand new bodies, and I start to wonder if these projections sent to aid some of the Fleet (or all of it in Starbucks case) are possible due to a shared wiring that humans and Cylons have going back hundreds of thousands or even millions of years with these other progenitors. And if at some point in all this evolution of technology and the working of complex systems the system that put it into being and stands behind the curtain on BSG’s journey, is an actual machine.

Call it the machine in the ghost of Jung’s collective consciousness.

Maybe a stretch, but I bet when Moore and Eik come out with their podcasts and interviews they will not explicitly state that God is behind it all. As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure I read one of them, Moore I think, say they were an atheist in an interview a couple of years ago.

Anyway, the finale could have been more clear, more bold in its assertions, braver in its resolutions, and provided closure that felt more organic to what has come before. I think there is little doubt they’ve made mistakes and had to juggle things down the stretch. Some things felt forced, other things, as I’ve said, were just left to imagination. I think at least part of this was because they could offer no satisfying answers themselves. But I’m certainly not opposed to having to ponder intent in fiction and discuss alternative explanations. It’s one of the things that make it fun. Sometimes it’s a quality that makes it great. I don’t think that was the case here because there is too much of a sense of much unresolved and deliberately avoided.

And man those sci fi cliches. THe bad technology allegory being the central one of course. Does anyone ever get tired of this or think its original? Even the idea of seeding Earth and we are all Cylons was both foreseeable 4 seasons ago and derivative. I hoped it wouldn’t be that obvious or silly but grew more accepting of the fact that we weren’t getting a tremendously breathtaking or original ending to all this.

But hey there is little new under the Sun, and maybe I need to reset expectations.

THere’s more to be said another time.  But I miss the show and shout a “So say we all!” to all its characters.

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I have all but decided to get a new face. At least partly.  New lives are even harder to come by. If you know a good face store let me know. Or life store for that matter.

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I really wonder what the hell I am doing living in Kingston NY.

So I’ll express it in Haiku:

kingston is not me                                                                                                                                                                                                    hive of scum and villiany                                                                                                                                                                                    these droids are not mine

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I don’t get the NIT tournament. You have the 64 teams in the NCAA tourney culminating in the almost religiously thought of Final Four. And let me say that any final four without Cylon University is no final four. But then you have this NIT thing going on which ostensibly seems to me to be a competition with televised games, paid crowds, etc to determine the 65th best team in the country.

Am I wrong here?

How is this allowed to go on? Does Obama know? Because you know, he seems way too interested in the goings on of college Basketball.

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Has he healed the economy yet? Because a lot of idiots seemed to think we’d see good things happening in the first 100 days.

We really are a stupid people.

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Are young women better looking today or am I just noticing more? I’m not the only one noticing this so I think something is up and I aim to get to the bottom of it. Right now I’m working on the hairstyle theory. i think throughout most of our history in which pictures and video are available women hadn’t yet figured out what I knew a long time ago: fancy hairstyles make them look crappy. Just long straight and framing the face is hot. Since Jennifer Aniston made that look of hers imitatable I think more women are going that way and it works for most.

Not sure yet. And that still doesn’t explain the way they look in jeans. But this could just be a wonder of modern engineering at its finest.

I’ll get back to you when I get more answers. If I suddenly disappear, well, you should look to the sexual-frustration- entertainment-cultural-genetics-industrial complex for answers.

Until then i soldier on for webslingers everywhere.

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Miscellaneous Stuff

Published on March 9, 2009 in ..The Dude. 0 Comments

I don’t like this daylight savings thing. When I was young we had to circle the Earth at super speeds to effect time or alter it an hour. Now these hooligans can just press a button. Sometimes they don’t have to do even that. Cable boxes and cell phones change by themselves. It’s not right I tell you and it’s creating a generation of good for nothings who won’t be able to go back in time if we should ever have to go off the electronic grid.

SPeaking of cell phones I still don’t know why any of us need these things except Doctors. It’s such a huge affectation. We keep accumulating these shiny new baubles as we hang on to the hedonistic treadmill and it’s not making too many of us happy. Sure you can say you want to keep in touch with work or family for emergencies. And they can come in handy. But a simpler phone or pager with no elaborate gadgets would do just as well. Society got on pretty well without any of this stuff until recently and science has yet to detect the survival  gene for instant communication.

WHich is not meant as an anti-technology rant. I love technology and usually am bothered by the countless American movies and literature that demonizes it. I think tech and science for the most part have only improved life and will continue to only improve it.

On that subject I saw The Watchmen and it too has some of that anti-tech point of view. Not going to get off on a long review as I’d like to because I don’t have the patience for that kind of thing anymore and the hubris and delusion that anyone cares about my analysis is no longer a symptom I am suffering from. But I liked the movie. Some of the speeches and romantic scenes bought it screeching to an uncomfortable stop at times and it was too long. But overrall a good job despite reinforcing that wary of science belief system through the auspices of Dr Manhattan and Ozymandias.

Science may well separate us a bit from our humanity as it does the big blue guy but considering much of what our humanity consists of I don’t think that’s a bad thing. And though Ozy’s kind of dispassionate analysis of our all too human issues can lead to some destructive decisions I tend to think those decisions come more from ideology than intelligence. His is not unlike the rationalizations of the Dick Cheney’s of our history but do we really believe those decisions were made out of too much thought? Or not enough?

I keep liking Green Day more and am so looking forward to the new concept album in May I want to freeze myself until then like Eric Cartman waiting for the Nintendo Wii.

There’s a point in life where you start losing more things than you gain. This is not a good place to get to especially if you have little to lose. Maybe that’s why all this stuff, these gadgets excite me less. Bread and circuses while the Kingdom of self crumbles.

Bye web slingers.