Das Binky

Avatar: A Quick Review

2009-12-23T21:22:00.007-06:00

Avatar is awesome, in the dictionary sense of the word. It inspires awe.

It's a beautiful ride, a true cinematic spectacle, and well worth the $15 they're charging for IMAX 3-D.

The plot is basically an old updated Western. It's Dances with Wolves in space, with 12-foot Blue Aliens instead of Native Americans, and a lot bigger explosions. It throws in some anti-war and pro-environmental themes for fun, but you're not going to pay a lot of attention to them. There's too much other stuff happening on-screen... random phosphorescent plants and flying beasties to distract you. (There are some interesting ethical discussions around the film, but feel free to explore those on your own.)

James Cameron wants Avatar wants to be like nothing you've ever seen before. In that sense, it fails. It's not radically different from the graphical stylings of Lord of the Rings, just an extension. (In fact Weta Workshop did graphics for both, and their style shines though in most of the landscapes.) That said, it's the lushest digital world ever created. It's the closest photo-realistic rendition of something like a Miyazaki landscape I've seen yet. It's not a quantum leap forward, but it is a true spectacle.

What really brings Avatar home, and justifies trying to see it in the theater, is the 3-D. This is one of the first 3-D movies I've seen that gets it. The added dimensions aren't gratuitous, don't give you a headache (if you follow some quick tips), and succeed at embedding you into the world of the movie in a way that 2-D graphics simply can't do. It becomes a visceral experience. Emerging back into the real world after almost 3 hours is almost disorienting.

Importantly, it's also the first movie I can recall to overcome the Uncanny Valley... the phenomenon wherein as things get more lifelife, they get creepier. The big blue aliens are tangible as characters, and after spending a few minutes getting to know them, they're not just normal, they're pretty damned sexy. This was a surprise to me, having mostly been exposed to images like the one to the above, which is fairly unsexy.

Randomly, this movie is my first exposure to Sam Worthington. His accent is confusing, and he looks distractingly like the love child of Paul Rudd and Jason Bateman. But he was fine. This ain't a movie concerned with acting.

Avatar is an excellent example of the spectacular escapist power of cinema. For 160 minutes, you're in a different time and place, and Cameron creates an intensely dense world to disappear into. It's not the best film ever made, and it won't stand for long as either the most technologically advanced or the most expensive. But it's well worth dragging yourself out to see. There have been a number of "better" movies this year, but if you were only going to see one movie in the theater this year, I'd make it this one or Watchmen.

Spring for the 3-D, and enjoy the ride.

Wiiiii!

2009-12-07T14:05:00.004-06:00

I was first introduced to gaming when I was about 6. Sometime in 1981, my dad brought home the Tandy TRS-80 Model III, a workhorse of a PC with the ability to create detailed ASCII graphics on command! Eventually, he let me in to the den, and I went to town.

I played some Star Trek knockoff, some other Adventure game, and probably some math games my dad had found. Humble beginnings that later gave way to the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, with my eventual descent into nerddom with the Nintendo Entertainment System. In early 1980's adjusted dollars, these were incredibly expensive machines. The Tandy was $2495, which is about $4200 in today's dollars. At least that had some non-gaming applications, though what they were I don't know. My grandfather funded a lot of the gaming systems. My youth seemed to center a lot on other people spending a lot of money on technology so that I could play with it. For this, I am eternally grateful.

Gaming is much more ubiquitous now, if only because computers are so much more ubiquitous now. Both of my daughters have been playing computer games since they were about 2, and both could control a mouse and navigate a web browser better than my parents by the time they were 3. Every kid-oriented site around offers a huge number of free web games, with a minimal amount of invasive advertising.

But for Xmas this year, I decided to do unto others as had been done unto me. It's time for some entertainment dollars to go directly to technology for the kids. And for a pair of 4 and 6 year old girls, that means we're getting a Wii.

The Wii appears to be the most egalitarian entertainment system ever made. It's intentionally behind on graphics, processing power and traditional "gaming" benchmarks. It's not made to be the biggest, smallest, fastest, etc. It's really just about fun. Pretending to go bowling, or play tennis, or whatever. And based on everything I've seen, a 4-year old can handle it. A number of parents I know report getting beaten at games by their young kids on a semi-regular basis.

I decided to make the experience a little more seamless for the kids by opening up the unit last night and doing most of the setup... running wires to hook it up to the TV, setting it up in the entertainment center, charging the batteries on the remotes, setting the clocks and Internet connection, stuff like that. Then, I just put the unit back in the box and it'll go under the tree. On Xmas morning, we can just plug it in and the kids are off.

In one sense, it's just another toy in a household with far too many toys, or a bigger game to replace all of the little games they've been playing for years. But in a very real sense, it feels like passing a torch. As a gamer, even a mild one, I've put up with 20+ years of derision from an older generation that doesn't understand the roles the games have played for us, and can't see them as anything beyond an upgrade to the nickelodeons of old. Gaming has shaped the way I think, and who I am. Without hyperbole, I would not be where I am without the analytic skills I developed playing games.

I've really enjoyed watching my daughters take their first steps into the same enjoyments I had as a kid, amped up to new levels. Who knows if they'll remember the Wii in the same way I remember it's great-great-great-grandfather, the NES? But I'm looking forward to watching them, and coming along for the ride.

Money Well Spent, New Jersey Republican State Committee

2009-11-02T09:12:00.003-06:00

I left New Jersey roughly three and half years ago, after having maintained my primary residence there for seven or eight years. While I lived there, I was generally politically apathetic. I voted in presidential elections, and probably in some of the gubernatorial and senatorial races. I had no idea who my local reps were. I never donated money, never signed a petition and was registered independent, meaning I could skip the primaries with a clear conscience.

In the past three or so weeks, I'd wager that about 75% of all calls to my landline phone have been from the New Jersey Republican State Committee, imploring my to vote for whomever they've got running this year. At least I assume that's what they're saying, since I generally hang up as soon as the call comes through. I listened to a few extra seconds the time Mitt Romney called, but that was more from the amusement factor. We've also been hit with about 20 pieces of junk mail reminding me to vote. One or two of these mentioned an absentee ballot, but most just wanted me to drive down to the polling place and vote. One actually called out the polling place, which Google Maps tells me is roughly 930.3 miles from my house.

Does no one in the NJ Republican Party know how to use a merge purge? I don't live or vote in NJ. My phone number (a WI area code) was obtained more than a year AFTER leaving NJ. I have never voted for a Republican candidate. I have no idea who the Republicans are running in NJ, though a quick Google search brings back an individual for whom my first two adjectives would be "husky" and "confused". I am a complete waste of the NJ Republican Party's money.

Corzine (the Democratic incumbent) seems to have done an excellent job of not targeting me. I cannot vote for him, and none of him sizable campaign dollars appear to have been spent trying to sway me to do so. The Republican war chest in NJ is much smaller, and they've been wasting time and money on me. Not much, but multiply me by however many other ex-New Jerseyians there are out there and it's probably a good chunk.

In the event the Republicans win, let's hope that this doesn't speak to their level of operational efficiency.

Where the Wild Things Are : A Quick Review

2009-10-22T14:57:00.003-05:00

WtWTA The Book is a nearly perfect piece of children's literature. It works because it gives readers (adults and children) just enough to create a world of their own, and ties it just enough to emotions we know to put us in that world. It doesn't do any more than it needs to, knowing that the stories we create in our heads are more powerful that those we see or read. It's a book everyone reads and remembers differently, an incredibly personal book for only a few dozen pages.

WtWTA The Movie is Spike Jonze's reading of the book. It's a valid and incisive reading that I found alternately touching and disturbing. And it's a movie that I wish had never been made.

At a 50,000 ft. level, the movie follows the outline of the book, though at 90+ minutes, there had to be some expansion. Jonze and Dave Eggers (who wrote the screenplay together), spend the movie fleshing out the rest of the world that WtWTA The Book put into their heads. The world of WtWTA according to Jonze and Eggers is a world of skin-deep metaphor, nebbish monsters, and a reflected vision of the internal violence of being a nine-year old boy. It's a beauteous world, though a mundane one; very little actually happens wherever it is the Wild Things Are.

There's a lot of things done right in the movie. The opening sequences (all pre-trip to the Wild Things) are a wonderfully brutal look into the loneliness of childhood, and may be hard for parents to watch. It's a stark look at the ways we hurt the one we love without thinking. Once we're with the Wild Things, the visuals knock your socks off. The Wild Things look great, their world is dense with beauty, and everything feels tangible in a way I didn't think they'd be able to pull off.

But just as many things are done wrong. I had trouble imagining that a vibrant 9-year old kid would surround himself with monsters who stole their personalities from extras in 1970s Woody Allen movies. Too many of the sequences felt like they were checked off from a list: first, we have a wild rumpus, then we build a fort, then we have a war. So much of the time with the Wild Things felt slooooow. Maybe at 80 minutes the movie would have felt taut, but at 94 minutes, it felt excruciating at points.

On the whole, I think there were more positives than negatives, but I can't help but wish I hadn't seen it. Or seen the previews. Or known about the movie.

This is Spike Jonze's WtWTA. Not mine. Mine was written in my head reading the book as a child, and re-written again reading it to my own children. My WtWTA was not as lush as Jonze's. It wasn't as existentialist. It may not have been as good. But it was mine. By giving shape and voice to Maurice Sendak's images and words, Jonze has taken something away that it may be difficult to get back.

With some books, this doesn't matter. Some authors are fond of saying that movies don't affect their books... the books are unchanged on the shelf, regardless of what people do with them off the shelf. With some books, that's true. Others, less so. Harry Potter readers may have trouble picturing Hermione as anyone other than Emma Watson, but that's not a completely bad thing. Dune readers may have trouble divorcing Dave Lynch's vision from Frank Herbert's. But in those cases, there are thousands of pages of words to shape a vision. Sendak gave us a few dozen.

So, I will go about re-claiming the book for my own. I'll give the movie a thumbs up, but I won't recommend it. (I especially won't recommend it for anyone younger than 10, and more realistically for anyone under 18. The images will disturb children, and the meaning won't resonate with teenagers. This is a movie made for people in their 30s and 40s.) Spike Jonze made a very interesting movie. I just wish he had kept it to himself.

Laziest Spam Ever

2009-10-05T09:17:00.002-05:00

Received this morning.

You have been choosen for a cash of {$850.000.00 USD}contact chevrontexaco80@hotmail.com with your Full Informations i.e Full Name,Address,Phone Number and any form of identification.

That was the entire mail. Sent from a separate email address. And somehow, GMail did not flag this as spam.

I am tempted to respond, just for the entertainment value.

Newspapers and Ralph Stanley

2009-09-13T08:17:00.007-05:00

We're part of the dying breed of folks who still subscribe to a physical newspaper, delivered daily to our doorstep and generally read cover to cover. We're motivated primarily by local news on that front; the national / AP feeds that pop up in the paper are days old by the time we get them. But for coverage of whatever local info is going around right now, we like having dead trees on our kitchen table.

On Thursday morning, I was flipping through our local entertainment insert (77 Square) and reading an article on the recently refurbished hundred-year old Stoughton Opera House, in which they casually mentioned that Ralph Stanley was playing there on Saturday.

I spit out my cereal and ran over to the computer to book tickets. (Which would have to wait... The Opera House doesn't have online ticketing. But they also don't have 33% service fees like Ticketmaster, so I'm cool with that.)

Ralph Stanley is the 82-year old leader of the Clinch Mountain Boys, and a mainstay on the bluegrass scene since the 1940's. Like most people under 40 not raised on bluegrass, I had no knowledge of Dr. Ralph until 2000, when the Coen Brothers released "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", which featured a soundtrack comprised almost entirely of old timey bluegrass. (For my dollar, it's the best soundtrack album ever made.) Stanley was featured on two tracks, including the haunting a capella track "O Death", and the gospel band "Angel Band", and the film's main track "Man of Constant Sorrow" was popularized by Ralph and his brother Carter. His voice stands out as something unique. The blurb from the playbill describes it perfectly:

Ralph Stanley’s voice is not of this century, or of the last one for that matter. Its stark emotional urgency is rooted in a darker time, when pain was the common coin of life and the world offered sinful humanity no hope of refuge.

So, I signed up for a ticket, managed to score a fourth row seat since I was going solo, and wandered down to the Opera House last night, and had a great old time. The show itself was just good. It was only about 90 minutes, and much of it was focused on Ralph's band rather than Ralph himself... at 82, he doesn't have a lot of dexterity left on the banjo and focused mostly on vocals. A number of songs featured other vocalists, who were all talented, but a bit of a distraction from the main event. But when he shined, he shined, and the best moments were up there some of the best concert going experiences I've ever had. Their gospel choir call-and-response of Amazing Grace was one of the best things I've ever heard live, and his voice is harmony with more conventional vocals creates a sound unlike anything else I've heard.

The evening felt like poking my head into another time for a few hours. Stanley ran the show like an old fashioned MC, with an almost vaudevillian aesthetic, only enhanced by the feel of the venue, which was going strong in Stanley's prime. This was a dying breed of entertainment, put on by one the original practitioners of the artform. And it was a blast.

A Premature Top 20 Movies of the Aughts

2009-09-02T09:08:00.002-05:00

There are still three months left in the first decade of the new millennium, but I was in a list mood and decided to throw together my draft Top 20 movies of the last decade.

It's a capriciously thrown together list, and one that will look different in three months and would probably look different if I did it next week, or last week. It's presented in chronological order, and with the caveat that while I see a lot of movies, I also miss a lot of movies. And I'm counting the Lord of the Rings as one movie.

Anyway, here you go:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
The Lord of the Rings (2001 - 2003)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Spellbound (2003)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
The Incredibles (2004)
A History of Violence (2005)
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Brick (2006)
Children of Men (2006)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Ratatouille (2007)
Once (2007)
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
In Bruges (2008)
Panyo (2009)
District 9 (2009)

If the list shows anything, it's that the auteur theory of film-making is still alive and well in my head. All but a handful of those are made by "filmmakers" rather than "directors", for whatever that distinction is worth.

If pressed for the Top 3 among those, I'd likely choose (in no order) The Royal Tenenbaums, Synecdoche, New York & either Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Children of Men. (I promise, I like comedies too.)

Anyway, these are fun, meaningless exercises that tell more about the person making the list than the movies themselves. But they are fun, hope you enjoy and decide to pick up any of these you haven't seen.

Oh, and for the extra curious, when I had to trim my original list down to an arbitrary 20, I cut out Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Amelie (2001) and Spirited Away (2001). Fun fun.

Wax (or, The Discovery of Television Among the Bees)

2009-08-28T14:33:00.003-05:00

Sometime in 1996 or so, a group of friends and I wandered down to the local Blockbuster chain on campus. It was a Friday night, and we had nothing going on, so we decided to rent some random sci-fi. At this point, Blockbuster wasn't homogenized to the level they are now. Each store had its own relatively idiosyncratic selection, though ours wasn't overly out there. The sci-fi section was only a few shelves high, and there are only so many times you can watch Dune or The Last Starfighter.

If you've ever tried to rent movies with guy friends, the experience is always a little odd. Depending on your crowd, it's either a race to the lowest common denominator to pick out either something everyone has already seen 15 times, or a pissing content to find the weirdest film on the shelf. (Or the one with the most breasts.)

We'd made it through most of the alphabet without a bite, until we saw something none of us had ever heard of. On the last shelf sat "Wax (or, The Discovery of Television Among the Bees)". It appeared to have some Tron-style computer graphics and some strange Gulf War imagery. There was no real plot description I could discern, just strange superlatives about the film. We figured "what the hell", picked it up and wandered back to the dorms.

And then our brains exploded.

I have no frame of reference to describe this movie.

Film.com offers the following capsule review, which is of little help:

The bizarre story of Jacob Maker, weapons-guidance designer and beekeeper extraordinaire. When the bees drill a hole in Jacob's head and insert a television with supernatural images that control his will, Jacob enters into a hallucinatory, alternative reality.

The more descriptive entry at Grey Lodge offers more, but still leaves me wanting.

"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is set in Alamogordo, New Mexico (1983), where the main character, Jacob Maker, designs gunsight displays at a flight simulation factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His hives are filled with "Mesopotamian" bees that he has inherited from his grandfather. Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to appear, introducing Jacob to a type of destiny that pushes him away from the normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities. The bees show Jacob the story of his grandfather's acquisition and fatal association with the "Mesopotamian" bees, in the years following the First World War.

The bees also lead Jacob away from his home, out to the Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing to him their synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the haze of his own thoughts. Passing through Trinity Site, birthplace of the Plutonium bomb, Jacob arrives at a gigantic cave beneath the desert. There, he enters the odd world of the bees, and fulfills his destiny. Traveling both to the past and the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he meets a victim that he must kill.

Thumbs up for the phrase "grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities." That kind of describes my job.

Anyway, that write-up comes closer, but again does no justice to the wonder and horror of Wax. Three or four of us watched the movie, splayed out on a dorm couch fueled by caffeine and pizza. The viewing experience was frequently punctuated by incredulous exclamations at our willingness to watch the film and confused real-time analysis of the plot and imagery. But no one left the room. It was, and remains, completely unlike anything I've ever seen. The somewhat retro-graphics interspersed with what appeared to be hand held video had no real frame of context for us, and the storytelling stretched the definition of abstract, even for a group of guys keenly addicted to David Lynch.

In a word, it was awesome.

I've never gotten up the interest / courage / gall to watch Wax again. It's not on Netflix. I believe you can watch some or all of it online. In a sense, some cinematic experiences are best left untouched. Watching a mindfuck of a movie on a couch with college friends is a lot different from streaming the same movie from your house as a thirty-something.

If you haven't heard of or experienced the movie, check it out. The NY Times has an interesting review worth checking out.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me what the strangest movie I've ever seen was. Now you know.

Summer Movie Recap

2009-08-24T10:48:00.007-05:00

When I started this little here blog-type thing, one of my main drivers was to have a spot to dump my brief thoughts on movies. I watch them a lot. Some good, most bad.

This summer, I went and saw a bunch. But real life has intervened such that I haven't had the time (or more to the point, the energy) to write up any of my thoughts.

Well, now it's August, and the summer movie season is over. So, here are my thoughts on a baker's dozen movies that I caught in theaters in the last few months.

I made a conscious decision not to either Transformers or GI Joe. Just assume they would have gotten Ds or Fs and move on. I'm still hoping to see The Hangover, Moon, (500) Days of Summer and Terminator Salvation, but otherwise, this is my full summer movie slate.

Wolverine - Oh my god, did this suck. Sure, it was fun to watch attractive people hit each other for a few hours, but the movie was god-awful boring and made no sense I liked a lot of the raw elements here, but it just meandered into huge plot holes, made nonsensical decisions, and worst of all, the events in the finale meant that the entire movie really didn't matter at all. D

Star Trek - By weird coincidence, I ended up seeing this three times and it held up surprisingly well. Strong cast, witty writing, taut action and a load of fun. Great re-boot. There were a few things that seemed a bit forced in to try and hit plot points, but on the whole I though it was the best Trek film since First Contact. B+

Night At The Museum 2: Battle Of The Smithsonian - I had forgotten I'd seen this one until I went back and looked at a list of summer movies. That really says about all you need to know. This was inoffensive, bordering on boring. It wastes the comic talents of a number of great comedians, like Hank Azaria, and just missed the mark across the board. I enjoyed the first one, but this wasn't even enough to call a re-hash. The kids liked it thought. C

Pixar’s Up - Someone stuck an existentialist mediation on death into my 3-D kids movie! This was excellent. Cried like a baby. Kids liked it too. If you want to get picky, it had some off pacing, but this is an example of a movie shooting real high and missing, but still outdoing all of its peers. It's stunning how far ahead of the American animation pack Pixar is in writing, animation, etc. A-

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - I just felt like taking the kids to the movies and this was the only family-friendly thing playing. Yawn. Some nice sequences, but nothing to write home about. Pretty graphics, and the squirrel sequences are wonderful little interludes. But again, yawn. C+

Public Enemies - A beautiful mess. One of the prettiest movies of the summer, great cinematography. But I just didn't connect with any of the characters, so it felt like a really well shot Biography channel special rather than a movie. I don't know if it just needed a script doctor or what, but it just couldn't make me care. A for looks, C for story, averages to a solid B

Funny People - I like Adam Sandler when he's maudlin (see Punch Drunk Love). I like Judd Apatow. I like Seth Rogan. I like dark comedies. I like dick jokes. This movie had all of those. And it sucked. The movie felt like two completely unconnected movies strung together with dick jokes. I barely laughed and found the movie a tiresome attempt to seem "grown up". I'm willing to watch a movie with unappealing characters, if those characters are interesting. In this movie, Sandler is a self-absorbed loser, learns nothing (until maybe the final 2 minutes, offscreen), and isn't psychopathic enough to be interesting. D+

I Love You, Man - This barely counts as a summer movie, but I saw it and never got around to writing about it. This is a fun little buddy comedy that features Judd Apatow (producing), dick jokes and actual humor. Nice random riffs, reasonably endearing characters, and a good heart to it. Not a great flick, but I enjoyed it. B-

Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince - Is there a point in reviewing Harry Potter movies at the stage? All this one had to do was fill space before the final movie(s) coming next year. And it did that fine. I'm not a stickler for the book vs. movie debate. I think this was a nice flick, enjoyed the overall mood, and thought it looked very lush. David Yates has been an interesting choice to finish out the series, and I thought this was a good step forward. B

G-Force - See Ice Age. Nothing else was playing. It's a talking hamster movie. That's about all you need to know. Zach Galafinakis was in for some reason, as was Will Arnett. Both interacting with talking hamsters. Yup. As a kids movie though, it was a lot of fun. I never need to think about seeing it ever again. C+

District 9 - Wow. Thumbs up all around, great low budget sci-fi flick with a non-too-subtle message in there. Some big plot holes, but the overall aesthetic made up for it. This was a nice breath of fresh air in a slow sci-fi season. Adding the director on to my list of "I'll be looking for whatever you make next." I want to see this again. A

Inglourious Basterds - A two-and-a-half hour movie with about five GREAT scenes and a lot of middlin' ones. The movie worked for me, but I can see where it might not for other people. This is Tarantino's most fetishistic movie, and probably his prettiest. I've never really though of him as a very visual director (i.e. more verbal), but there are some great images here. Another one I want to see again a few times, and some stellar acting. A-

Ponyo - Pure movie magic. A movie that understands what it wants to do, executes against that vision perfectly, and does it with flair. Miyazaki may be the best working filmmaker today, in terms of having a complete vision he fulfills. He may be working on some other plane of existence, but I love that we get to peek in there now and then. A

And, that's it. It's been a fun cinematic summer. I also caught a few other fun things on video over the summer, including Synecdoche, New York which I want to watch a few more times but I think may be one of the best 2 or 3 movies of the decade. More on those later, but rush out to see the "A"s above if you haven't already.

How we magically fix all of your problems

2009-08-24T07:51:00.003-05:00

This is possibly the most useful comic ever published.
(Click link or picture if the writing is too small.)

http://xkcd.com/627/

In Which I Touch Briefly On Health Care

2009-08-18T09:04:00.004-05:00

I've been pondering a post on health care for a little while now. It's a topic on which I have reasonably strong feelings, and one on which I consider myself reasonably well informed.

But Emily over at The Lost Albatross nicely captured the essence of any argument I'd put up in a good set of opening sentences.

Every person in this country should have the right of access to quality, affordable health care.

No caveats, no conditions, no strings. Everyone. Health care is and should be treated as a fundamental right.

As I see it, agreement or disagreement on those set of statements really frames the entire debate. The rest is just details, albeit a very expensive set of details. Whether it's single payer, a public option, health care co-ops or something else, I don't mind. (For various reasons, I prefer a public option, but that's neither here nor there. I doubt more than a small percentage of people involved in the debate could tell you what a public option means, or why it's good or bad.)

I work for a private health insurance plan. As best as I can tell, we aren't one of the evil ones, though I work in information technology, so my exposure to any alleged "death panels" and the like is relatively limited. We're provider (i.e. physician) owned, so our incentives are different from other companies. I like the model, and it's one I believe in.

And I hope that the model can fit into any health care reform out there. UPS and FedEx exist alongside the USPS. Harvard and Yale co-exist nicely with the University of Wisconsin and UPenn. And more to the immediate point, my company plays very nicely with Medicare and Medicaid.

There is room for public and private options in almost any industry sector you can imagine.

Health Insurance is confusing. To some degree, that's impossible to avoid... Health Care as a whole is confusing. Attempts to simply it are great, but reductionism is dangerous in a different way. But look at the sentences called out above. That's a hell of a mission statement. Quibble all you want about details, but I'd love if we could re-frame the debate in those terms.

If you disagree with that mission statement as being Socialist, I'll kindly ask you to pull your kids out of public schools, bury your trash in your backyard, stop expecting the fire department to save your house, give the police permission to patrol elsewhere, allow TV stations to charge for over-the-air TV signals and starting paving your own streets.

Still here.

2009-08-04T09:15:00.001-05:00

I'm still alive, I promise.

Just cleared a major hurdle to my mental free time. Hoping to get back on the horse again shortly.

Undertow: The Someone EP

2009-06-30T22:20:00.014-05:00

Undertow formed sometime in the Fall of 1991 or Spring of 1992. I don't quite recall quite how, I just remember someone saying I should show at at some guys house with a few other people and suddenly we were in a band. Originally, there were six of us at the first practice, but we quickly "kicked out" two of them and demoted one of the others to half-time. (Worth noting, the original lead singer is now a professional writer and Salon.com's Washington Bureau Correspondent, and the original keyboardist is now an acclaimed professional keyboardist on Broadway. The guys who stayed in the band mostly work in computers.) In retrospect, I assume it was Jeff who had arranged everything, from the initial formation to the eventual shaping of the band. (And I also doubt the other guys were actually "kicked out", but it makes for a better story.) The core membership quickly set in with me, Jeff and Mat (then Matt, I believe), with sporadic involvement by Jordan.

I remember very little about the first practices. I played bass in the band, which was new for me. I'd only recently purchased a bass, some ugly blue $100 Charvette. My inclusion in the band was likely due more to the fact that I actually owned a bass. By that point (start of sophomore year), guitarists were a dime a dozen, but no one played bass. (Worth noting, I did not own a bass amp. I instead used my guitar amp, which took on some very odd characteristics due to misuse, including a tendency to fart when you turned it off.)

Our sound was really a direct amalgam of our influences. Jeff wanted nothing more deeply than to be Eddie Vedder, Jordan and Mat worshipped Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction, and I loved Warrant & Poison. Our early setlists more or less reflected this combo, with the exception of the hair metal, which was definitively uncool by that point. Album tracks from Gish, stuff from the Singles soundtrack, covers of songs our favorite bands covered... that was what we played. In fact, our very first live song was The Who's Baba O'Reilly, played exclusively because Pearl Jam covered it. (And because Jordan could mostly play the keyboard part.)

In a sense, the band really became our lives. Every Saturday, we'd meet in Mat's basement for 4 or 5 hours, playing music and eating pizza. Waking moments were spent either at school, doing homework, practicing with the band or practicing solo. (Or engaged in low level debauchery.) It took six months or so before we were ready for an audience.

The date of our first show (and the first live rock performance for anyone in the band) is lost to antiquity (or at least my collection of flyers), but it took place at Fatty's Restaurant in downtown Rockville sometime during the spring or summer of 1992. (Fatty's is no more, sadly.) It was a 2 hour show, $8 at the door ($3 cover and $5 food minimum). The show was a wonderful mess. Recordings of it exist somewhere, but I can't find them. We probably played 75% covers, 25% originals, and we bounced around on instruments constantly. (We were proud of our prowess at multi-instrumentalism... one flyer I found read "Jeff - vocals / guitar / bass --- John - bass / guitar / vocals ---- Jordan - guitar / bass / vocals (mysteriously leaving out keyboard).) I remember the stage getting mobbed during an "audience participation" cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Because I could scream reasonably well, I sang the Chris Cornell part on Hunger Strike, probably in a different key than Jeff.

In retrospect, we must have sounded horrible. We didn't have anything resembling a PA, so our sound was entirely dictated by our amps pointing at the audience and people yelling "John's too loud!" or "We can't hear the vocals!" I think we ran vocals through my practice amp. But it worked, and we quickly became the go-to band for all of your sonic needs, if you were an underclassman at Richard Montgomery High. (Mat went to Wootton, which featured more band competition for whatever reason.)

Before long, Jeff had some songs written, probably about a dozen. (Jordan wrote a few songs too, but Mat and I were silent partners for the most part.) My technophile grandfather bought me a Tascam four-track mixer and we set out to make our first EP. I'm reasonably sure that with the exception of my "work" with Fetal Pigs, this was the first time any of us had recorded anything, let alone multi-track recording.

We went down to Tower Records on Rockville Pike and bought a 20 pack of these super high-quality 20 minute Maxell tapes. They became the recording medium for the Undertow "Someone" EP. Over the course of a few weekends, we all took our turns playing into the recorder, and we had a record. Mat technically "engineered" it, in that he did things like putting a table on its side to "isolate" the drums. But mostly we went directly out of our amps in to the recorder and that was it. We had no idea what we were doing, but we did it with gusto. (In one of the more absurd rituals we had, we degaussed before every recording. We'd read that static electricity could mess with the recording medium, so we ran a ring degausser over the 4-track before every session. This probably did more harm than good.)

The lead song was "Someone", a rather cheesy little ballad Jeff had penned about his unrequited, though publicly acknowledged, crush on a girl in our class named Kristen Monie. (This crush also manifested itself in the capitalization of the letters M-O-N-I-E to form her last name on our fliers.) It featured four chords, no chorus, and a bridge directly lifted from a Led Zeppelin song. An unlikely hit, but there it was.

Our second track was "Whitewash", my favorite song on the EP. I have no idea what the words are about, but I dig the groove. At one point in the song, Mat and I get completely out of sync and end up creating this awesome alternate groove. I still think this is pretty out there for high school sophomores.

The third track was an acoustic version of "Someone", featuring Jordan playing my parent's baby grand.

Our final track showcased our social awareness (or at least Jeff's social awareness) and was an acoustic number called "Take a Good Look." It was about homelessness, and even managed to work in a pro-choice message too. It was the 90s alright.

The whole thing clocked in at about 17 minutes, and it made us rock stars.

As I remember it, the album was a bit of a big deal. We were the first band in our high school year to actually write and record anything. We sold it for $4 and called it our first single, billed as "featuring the track Someone in both acoustic and electric versions, along with two tracks that would not be released on the impending album!" Yup. B-sides already. (Like any good band, we'd already titled our unwritten album... it was called "Termites in my Wet Basement". Named after a flood in Mat's basement revealed a termite infestation, cancelling practice.) Distribution was all manual... Me & Mat copying tapes in our bedrooms. A guy named Maury Apple did the album cover. I can't remember how many albums we sold, but I think it was in the dozens, approaching 100. All of them were to friends and family, as far as I know. We sold out, or at least came close to it.

Undertow continued to play out quite a bit, both with and without Jordan. We played Fatty's a few more times. The high school Rock Bash, our first show that required auditions. Inexplicably, we played a Jimi Hendrix Festival, despite not knowing any Jimi Hendrix songs. (We learned Purple Haze at the last minute, and I played the Star Spangled Banner.) And we even played the City of Rockville's Battle of the Bands (high school edition, I assume). That was a fun show, since Mat and Jordan had been grounded for something or another (fleeing the police while on a late night stroll, I think?) and Jeff and I played with a backup drummer. We scored really well and may have won the competition, except for a judge who rated us very low for our pro-choice song "The Right", a catchy tune which rather unsubtly declared as its chorus "She's got the right to choose!" and stole its entire musical structure from "Jack & Diane". (His objections stemmed from his own pro-life stance, not his objection to John Melloncamp plagiarism.)

Throughout my junior year (92-93), the band played on, but things started to change. For whatever reason, it started becoming more "Jeff's Band" than Undertow, at least in the eyes of Mat, Jordan and me. Maybe it was one too many Pearl Jam covers, maybe it was a growing friendship between the rest of us that didn't include Jeff as much, maybe it was the realization that Jordan had a much better singing voice, maybe it was my own frustration playing bass rather than lead guitar, maybe it was the inherent need for teen rebellion in an environment without all that much to rebel against or maybe it was something completely invented, but for whatever reason, we just got sick and resentful of the band. Over the summer of 1993, Jeff spent the summer in Germany, and Mat, Jordan and I formed Twisted Fish.

In one of the grand asshole moves of all time, we didn't let Jeff know he wasn't in the band until he saw me selling copies of the new Twisted Fish EP to someone in our English class. (Sorry, man. We sucked.)

That effectively ended the Undertow experience. Later though, in late Summer of 1994, Mat, Jeff and I did get together and record another batch of original songs that were never released. I did uncover the masters for those in my basement recently, and need to get them to Mat for mixing down.

So, without further ado, I present the first appearance online of the Undertow "Someone" single. This recording is super-low quality, just a walkman into my soundcard, but it'll give an idea to anyone curious. Maybe Mat can post a better version at some point. (Sorry these aren't streaming, but the low quality results in weird anomalies when I try to set it up.)

Enjoy!

Goddamn Stupid Peice of Shit

2009-06-21T21:50:00.002-05:00

So, in an effort to stimulate the economy, celebrate Father's Day and generally waste my own time and money, I decided to buy a new AV Receiver today. I can't say I needed a new AV Receiver, but I'm vaguely considering a few new HDMI devices in the not-too-distant future, and thought it'd be nice to lay the groundwork for them while cleaning up my existing setup.

My home theater setup right now is borderline annoying. I've got a cheesy Home Theater in a Box setup that I bought ages ago, an HD cable box, a non-HD dual tuner Tivo, an HDMI switcher (since my TV only has one HDMI input), a standard def (but HDMI upconverting) DVD changer and the TV itself. In all this leads to five basic activities: watching Tivo, watching HD cable, watching HD cable with surround sound, watching DVDs and watching DVDs with surround sound. (Six activities if you also count the external input for the TV, which we use for video games and blowing up the laptop.)

We also have a Logitech Harmony remote to manage all this crap, since otherwise I'd have six different remotes to wrangle.

The amount of cabling in this setup is borderline obscene and difficult to get at. Most of the cabling to the TV is 4 meters long to accommodate the hidden wiring, and since everything has its own separate audio, there are wires running left everywhere.

My goal in a new AV receiver was to eliminate the HDMI switch, and possibly consolidate some of the audio cables into the HDMI. I found a nice mid-range Pioneer unit I liked that was on sale at Best Buy, so I picked it up. It can even talk nice with the iPhone!

The first hour or so went smoothly, removing the existing unit and hooking up speakers and the DVD player. Then came time for the HD cable box. Plug in the HDMI and the screen flashes: "The HD content protection of your display has been compromised. Please use the YPbPr outputs for your HD connection." It does this for 20 seconds and then goes black. Off to google I go...

It turns out that the box I have from Charter cable is particularly sensitive in the HDCP handshake required with the TV, and my new receiver doesn't seem to handle it. Which means that I can't use the receiver with my existing cable box through HDMI. It IS possible to go through component cables, so I wander down to the basement and dig out a set I have down there. No dice. After spending 15 minutes hooking them up, it turns out that I can't have a setup with component cables in and HDMI out. I don't have a spare 4 meter component cable, so I'm shit out of luck.

So, I spent 30 minutes un-hooking the new receiver and hooking the old one back up, and now I've got to re-pack my receiver and return it. Not because it doesn't work, but because it doesn't play nice with my system thanks to some fairly pedantic protocol negotiation aimed at stopping people from copying digital movies.

My buddy Josh pointed out this excellent recent Onion article that describes my experience perfectly, and wonderfully profanely.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

Fried

2009-06-12T16:06:00.002-05:00

I'd forgotten what it's like to feel completely fried. Too much work, too many hobbies, too much kid stuff, not enough sleep.

Silence in this space implies that too much is going on elsewhere.

Things I want to write about when I have time:

Movie Reviews for: Wolverine (bleh), Star Trek (sweet!) and Up! (sweet!, but in a different way)
My obsession with Look Around You
Band Fun, including the large new mixer we've been eying for more than a year
Kid Fun
My forgetfulness re: showering, and what this implies
The garden
Other things escaping my mind now

Hope things are well in your blog-o-ville.

Dextromethorphan & Phenylephrine rule my life

2009-05-28T10:44:00.003-05:00

My allergies generally aren't too bad, thanks to a long regimen of allergic immunotherapy earlier this decade. A Claritin (10mg loratadine) on heavy allergy days, and I'm fine. Moving from the warmer east coast to the cooler climes of Wisconsin has helped. Lower temps = less pollen. (My specific cocktail of east coast allergens included Grass, Ragweed and Tree Pollen, though with different sets of each out here, my protections aren't as robust any more.)

On our drive back east last week, I noticed a marked change once we crossed the Mason Dixon Line. Namely, major nasal congestion leading to post-nasal drip leading to the variety of coughing that makes people suspect you're the cause of every pandemic in the last decade. For whatever reason, my constitution LOVES post-nasal drip. If I get it for a day, I get it for a month. One time, I ignored it too long and it turned into bronchitis.

So now, I get to be "that guy" for the month of June, constantly sucking on a cough drop (Menthol 7 mg), renewing my Day-Quil (the aforementioned Dextromethorphan 10 mg & Phenylephrine 5 mg, with a nice shot of Acetaminophen 325 mg to quell the chest pains from epic coughing fits) every 4 hours and sounding more like Barry White than a white man should. Yay. Adding to the fun, I have a gig on Friday, so I need to power-up with lots of other fun stuff to keep me up and going. Whoo-hoo!

Final total for the road trip: 2004.8 miles, including sidetrips. The kids were troopers. Given the cost differential (maybe $200 for gas vs. more than $1200 for flights), I suspect this is now our preferred travel method out east. Fun stuff.

A Random Collection of Thoughts for Today

2009-05-14T10:34:00.005-05:00

As you probably know, I record random cover versions of my favorite songs and post them to my website now and then. One of my favorite singer-songwriters is a guy named Paul Sanchez. About 8 years ago, I recorded a version of one of his songs called "Confidential Dance." Last night, I checked my email and saw this: "I just checked out your version of my song Confidential Dance, very cool. Rockin' but still vulnerable. i dig it, thanks for the cover. red beans and ricely yours, Paul Sanchez"
Awesome.
Last night, I played a little local showcase for FAWM. Did four songs and a little jam. Can you think of a better way to get pumped up for the show than getting an email from one of your favorite artists telling you they listened to something you did and thought it was cool?
The show went really well. I remembered most of the words, my setup went mostly without a hitch, and the dozen or so people there seemed to enjoy it. From my end, I like playing enough that I'll play to an empty room as long as there are lights on me.
I may have some video of the event up shortly, for anyone who wants to watch a grainy, static webcam of me yelling.
Many thanks to Drewfus for comin' out and representing for the Das Binky Recording Collective. He is owed beers.
Got home at about midnight, went to bed around 12:30. When I got upstairs, three-year old DD was still awake, reading a book with the light on. I recommended she go to bed, but she expressed no interest. I decided this wasn't a battle I wanted to deal with, and just encouraged her to go to bed soon.
At 12:37, DD and sister ran in saying that the light was broken. It turns out that it was. But then I noticed the clock was out. And that the street looked really dark too. Yup, the power was out. The kids were freaked out and crept into bed with Mommy. I found a flashlight and wandered downstairs to call the power company. Power came back at about 2 am.
In a somewhat un-related incident, the Internet went out at around 7 pm. I called the phone company this AM, and after 20 minutes of tests, we determined that the cable modem was fried. K mentioned that a big lightning strike hit nearby around them, and it occurs to me that the modem is NOT plugged into a surge protector. So, they're sending a new one, and I'm without Internet at home for 2 days.
I've recently become addicted to a new video game called "Plants vs. Zombies", in which you try to stop a wave of zombies from destroying your house by placing militant plants on your lawn. It's awesome. As a result of this game, I've been up till around 1 AM three times this week. Watch the music video trailer. It will eat your brain with its awesomeness.
As a result of being up too late too many days in a row, coupled with the added lost sleep due to the power outage, I am borderline comatose today. This manifests itself in a bleakly dark sense of humor and an unwillingness to deal with bullshit. I would have worked from home, but I have no Internet. I would have taken the day off, but I'm taking off four days next week. Yay.
We're prepping for a big road trip next week. I went to AAA and got a Triptik. In a nice bit of forethought, I got an extra set of maps for the kids to use / enjoy / destroy. We'll be logging about 2500 miles over the course of a week, all of it with the kids. I can't decide if we're adventuresome or idiotic.
As an aside to all of the above, on the whole, people need to chill out some more.

Nature at Work, with a little help

2009-05-04T09:16:00.003-05:00

On Sunday, we took a little roadtrip down to Janesville, WI to check out the botanical gardens. Good fun, and afterwards we stopped by a little nursery in town to check out the early season plants. There was nothing we were interested in yet, but the girls were absolutely fascinated by a Venus Fly Trap, so we picked one up.

Every kid gets a Venus Fly Trap at some point. You poke at it a few times, set off all of the little mouths, put it on a windowsill and forget about it until 2 months later it's dead. It's a fun cycle.

By the time we got the thing home, three of the five mouths had been triggered by false alarms of one kind or another (only one linked to the kids). I'd set it up in the living room, nice bright warm room with a lot of indirect sunlight. Everyone was playing around the house, and I heard a big ol' housefly buzzing around the front room. Not a normal housefly, but a big, slow ginormous one. Stupid guy too, kept buzzing in the same circle by the front window.

I grabbed a paper towel and batted the dude down... didn't kill him, just stunned him a bit. Grabbed his wings and took him over to the fly trap and fed him in. It looked pretty comical... the dude was way too big for the tiny Venus Fly Trap mouth. It looked like an anaconda trying to eat a deer. But the plant dutifully closed as best as it could, and I ran to get the kids.

Unfortunately, the fly unstunned himself and pretty quickly realized that he could just walk out of the trap. He did so, and spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out on the warm stems of the fly trap. At this point in the season, there aren't too many flies in the house for the plant to feed on, so maybe I'll take it outside in the evenings to get some grub.

Fun times at the Das Binky house.

The Wackness: A Quick Review

2009-04-27T09:20:00.003-05:00

I'm really lukewarm on "The Wackness", but that's more of an averaged-out reaction than an overall reaction. Parts of it were spot-on excellent, depicting a menagerie of locations and characters that perfectly capture a time and place. But much of it was mired down in the kind of narcissism that doomed "The Ice Storm" and kept me from really connecting with anything in the movie for more than a few scenes at a time. Fire and Ice make lukewarm water, right?

The movie follows Josh, a teen pot dealer, and his friendship with his addict shrink (Ben Kingsley) throughout the summer of 1994. (Is 15 years ago too soon to have a period piece? And did I really graduate from high school 15 years ago?) Josh mostly spends the summer trying to have a relationship with his shrink's step-daughter, and failing in one way or another, while Ben Kingsley slowly tries to flush his life down the toilet. They're an interesting pair, sort of a Harold and Maude for the 90s. Josh takes Sir Ben on a tour of his world, and "hilarity" ensure.

It gets a little tiresome to watch people just be petty and irresponsible for an hour and a half. It's one thing to watch on a Trainspotting kind of scale... here, it just came across as a little boring. I had trouble caring about them. Josh is an interesting character in spots... he's a naive, innocent drug dealer, and a lonely kid yearning for connection. As the shrink, Ben Kingsley is alternately entertaining and alienating, but mostly sad.

I can't quite recommend this flick. It's got something to offer for the right audience... if you suspect you might be in that audience, check it out. Otherwise, I think there are a lot of other movies that offer better versions of the same aspects the movie tries to capture, ranging from "Do the Right Thing" to "Harold & Maude" to "Friday" (if you're looking for the drug comedy this was marketed as).

As a bit of a post-script, this is the third or fourth movie in last few months that I've come into with completely misguided expectations thanks to misleading movie marketing and/or poor Netflix descriptions. The Wackness was described as an indie comedy, and is about anything but. The extent of the comedy is pretty much "Look, Ben Kingsley has a bong!", or maybe the larger "all of life is a joke" style of comedy. This was a comedy in the same way "The Catcher in the Rye" is a comedy. I understand that movie marketers need to do their best to sell a movie, but I've been feeling really misled lately in relying on genre descriptions. Shape up, marketers!

Fetal Pigs: Where's the Drummer?

2009-04-26T18:33:00.013-05:00

In the past 10 years or so, I've moved at least seven times. Every move requires me to pack up all of my crap into boxes and shuttle them around. With frequent moves, you end up with some boxes that don't get opened for a few years at a time.

This afternoon, I spent some time cleaning up the basement, and rifled through a few of those boxes. And in one of them, I found a neat old gem... the first "album" I ever recorded, on New Year's Eve 1990.

The band was called Fetal Pigs. It was me and my buddy Mike, who was one of only two or three people I knew who played guitar. We sat next to each other in science class. We'd hang out a lot looking at tablature books, chatting about guitarists and feebly playing. By late 1990, I'd been playing guitar for maybe a year and a half. Mike had been playing about half that time.

Our drummer was a guy named Roland, who was the first guy I legitimately made any music with, ever. Roland and I were the guys in the basement doing air guitar to Def Leppard (and his brother's Depeche Mode albums). We graduated from air guitar to posing with tennis rackets in front of a mirror, and eventually got actual instruments at about the same time. Mike and Roland didn't really know each other if I remember, but by virtue of being the only drummer I knew, Roland was in the band.

Mike had a sleep over for New Years. (This was 8th grade, so not having a big party to go to wasn't overly weird.) Roland couldn't make it. So, we created our Magnum Opus, "Where's The Drummer?" :

I don't remember the exact recording process, but I'm pretty sure it was Mike's tape recorder sitting in the corner of the room. No mics, no drums, no bass, no multi-tracking, just the two of us on vocals and guitar, all live takes. Awesome. The entire album clocks in at about 13 minutes. Note the sticker indicating that this is the "MASTER" recording. I don't know if that means this was actually the tape we recorded on, or whether it's a first generation copy. As a sign of our laziness in obtaining a pristine recording, immediately after the album ends, it bleeds into some random Morning Zoo DJ I'd taped off the radio. I'm pretty sure the stock picture of the drums was from an ad in a guitar magazine.

I don't recall whether we actually did anything with this. I don't know that we made a copy for anyone else, played it for anyone other than our parents, or actually did anything with any of the songs. As I remember it, this was in a complete vacuum.

Notice that little bit of paper sticking out the left side? That's the liner notes:

(My handwriting still looks exactly like that.)

Here's the full page:

But since that's pretty much illegible (it's 18 year old Mac dot matrix), here's the text:

FETAL PIGS - WHERE’S THE DRUMMER?

WARZ SUCK — they just do... (dedicated to Saddam Hussein)
JIMI IS GOD — Mike’s true hero (dedicated to Mr. Hendrix)
EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN — as recorded by Poison
BATTLING AXES FROM HELL — a brief moment of inspiration (very brief)
WHERE’S THE DRUMMER — a basic explanation of the album (a joke, nothing more)
ALL CHICKENS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL — our instrumental anthem (sounds better live!)

Fetal Pigs are:

John Argentiero — lead vocals, lead guitar
Mike Palys — lead & backing vocals, rhythm guitar
Roland Lo — drums

John uses Yamaha Electric Guitars, Washburn Acoustics, Marshall amplifiers, and Dunlop picks.
Mike uses B.C. Rich Electric Guitars, Gianinni Acoustics, Marshall amplifiers, and his favorite translucent purple pick
Roland uses Pearl drums, Zildjian cymbals and whatever sticks he can get his hands on.

If you are interested in playing bass in an up and coming young band give us a call (we can supply bass)!

This EP was written, recorded, and mixed during a twelve hour period between December 31, 1990 — January 1, 1991

Roland was absent at the recording of this EP because he wasn’t sleeping over at Mike’s house on New Year Eve.

Coming soon - FETAL PIGS II: Afterbirth

Some notes on the above:

The EP is recorded on both sides of a cassette, same stuff on both sides. By weird coincidence, if you flip the tape after the last song, it's almost exactly at the start of the same song on the other side. Bad ass.
I have guitar solos in most of these songs. They are all exactly the same.
I was lead guitarist on this effort, but Mike lapped my skill set pretty quickly after this. I believe he went to sleepaway guitar camp, and came back with a lot more technique than I had. Realistically, I never got a whole lot better than what you hear on the tape, I just got nicer equipment. And I switched mostly to bass for the rest of my high school bands.
In "Jimi is God", I attempt to play a brief guitar solo with my teeth. I had braces at the time. At one point, the string get caught in my braces, very audibly. This is the coolest record I have of anything from my youth.
Every Rose has it's Thorn was completely my idea. Mike hated Poison. I still play that song in my band. I don't actually play the solo that much better.
I still love my manically spastic solos on "Battling Axes from Hell". I suspect that with an actual amp, they would have sounded better. Mike's solos are the slower, jazzier ones. Mine are the one's that sound like someone who had too much caffeine.
The "Sounds Better Live!" tagline for "All Chickens Are Not Created Equal" is a bit of a lie. Fetal Pigs never played live. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced we ever played this in practice. (Nor am I sure we ever actually practiced as a full band.)
"All Chickens Are Not Created Equal" is really just a bizarre series of overlapping unrelated riffs in different keys played on top of one another. It's instrumental and, in retrospect, a complete waste of tape.
With the exception of the opening riff in "All Chickens Are Not Created Equal", I'm reasonably sure Mike wrote all of the music and most of the lyrics.
"Fetal Pigs II: Afterbirth" never actually came out. (Though, I did write some cheesy metal under the moniker Ultradeath using the Fetal Pigs : Afterbirth album name. The listing is still up here, but the file is long gone.)
We never got a bassist. Roland left the band shortly after this, and was replaced by Dave Mathison, who was probably the only guy Mike knew that played drums. (Band politics in 8th and 9th grade were weird.) Fetal Pigs lasted another few years, mostly as a cover band. I don't think any of these songs were ever played again.
Re: the equipment list, this was something we saw in all of our metal albums, and it never occurred to me that these rock stars were naming their equipment because they had promotional deals with the companies. We were just naming them because they were the only instruments we had and we thought they were cool. (Though as Mike progressed into more serious guitar work, he was later mortified by his B.C. Rich Warlock.)
On the equipment topic, most of the acoustic guitar is my 12-string Washburn. All of the amps are single-channel practice amp, and sound painful. My guitar was my yellow Yamaha, which I still have today.

So, those were good times. Fetal Pigs continued to exist as a minor entity until I started playing with Undertow in 10th grade. Mike and I went to different high schools and were heading in different musical directions, and the band and friendship drifted apart. I consider Undertow (more on them at a future date) my first "real" band, since we actually played live shows. But this tape is a really cool document of my first musical experiments. Good stuff.

And since I KNOW you're longing to hear it, here you go. After writing about it, I decided I needed to have a copy for the kids. This is just a walkman into my PC, so the noise level is horrible, but deal with it. (Especially on the opening of Every Rose...)

Presented for the first time since 1991, Fetal Pigs' Where the Drummer. In Mono.

For some reason, the streaming thing isn't working for these, so click to hear them.

WARZ SUCK — 2:14

JIMI IS GOD — 0:34

EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN — 4:01

BATTLING AXES FROM HELL — 1:04

WHERE’S THE DRUMMER — 0:55

ALL CHICKENS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL — 4:04

Some Additional Thoughts on Watchmen

2009-04-21T09:02:00.003-05:00

NOTE: If you haven't seen and read Watchmen, this post will be of limited or no interest at all, and it contains Spoilers for both. If you intend to see or read Watchmen, bookmark this for later. Also, Giant Squid.

So, I finally finished re-reading the Watchmen graphic novel and have seen the movie twice. One of my first thoughts is that anyone who has any complaints about the film's deviations from the source material (from a plot / inclusion perspective) has incredibly unrealistic expectations. With the exception of the ending (more in a minute), this is one of the most faithful adaptations of a novel I've ever seen that still managed to work as a standalone movie. Some adaptations (the first two Harry Potter movies for example) stick so doggedly to the source material that the film suffers greatly... novels and cinema are different mediums, and what works in one wouldn't work in another. On the whole, Zack Synder did an awesome job, much better than I would have expected after seeing "300".

The Watchmen novel would have been an unwatchable five-hour movie with no momentum had they filmed it totally faithfully. For the sake of momentum, things have to be dropped. Major drops were minimal... the whole Tales of the Black Freighter story (which has been made as a separate movie), Hollis Mason's death, a lot of chatting at the news stands and more Dr. Manhattan on Mars. A few other minor encounters. And it's easy to see how adding those in would have pushed the running time past three hours, again killing the momentum. (And we may get a chance to find out. Most of that stuff was filmed and will be out on DVD.)

I do think some of the tonal changes / additions were a little much... As Abstract Citizen pointed out, the action-y fight scenes dilute the idea that the Watchmen (other then Dr. Manhattan) are just normal folks in peak physical condition, not actual superheroes. That created a bit of a disconnect. And the sex scene felt hyper cheesy. But both of those additions make the movie more accessible to the casual fan. (Anyone longing for a "normal guy" super-hero can go watch Billy Zane in "The Phantom" and tell me how much fun that was.)

As for the ending... at the risk of sounding heretical, the movie's ending was better. The Giant Squid was weird and cool, but it really comes out of nowhere and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The explanation of how the squid "works" is just kinda weak: The process of teleporting the creature kills it, and the cloned implantation of a psychic's brain sends an amplified death wave out, killing half the city and driving millions more insane. Ok then. Cool in context, but admittedly a little bit of a stetch. (Awesome visuals though.) The movie's choice to frame Dr. Manhattan as the source of Earth's potential destruction allows for more connection with the characters, a more closed circle and a more "feasible" future. The guys over at Chud put it well:

In the book? Veidt creates world peace by tricking the world into believing in aliens. The introduction of this "other" creates an new sense to togetherness that puts all differences aside.

In the movie? Veidt creates world peace by tricking the world into believing in GOD. An old testament kind of God. The watching, wrathful, Sodom and Gomorrah destroying type of God.

To me, that's a more affecting ending. The world already understands and fears Dr. Manhattan. The Giant Squid... well, it's a giant squid that wiped out New York. It's a little more abstract than the God Figure living among you for the past few decades turning on the world.

Both the Watchmen movie and novel are stand-alone artifacts. (I suspect it might be difficult to go into the movie completely cold, but I'm not sure.) I enjoyed them both equally and in different ways. And importantly, I'm glad they both exist.

Geekish Enthusiasm

2009-04-20T13:08:00.003-05:00

For the most part, I find memoirs pretty boring and self-serving. Or narcissistic and solipsistic. I don't enjoy them. But one of the first sets of memoirs I ever remember reading were Richard Feynman's two books of anecdotes, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

Feynman has a natural curiosity and directness that I find completely fascinating and endearing. There's a particular bit of an anecdote of his that sticks with me quite a bit, from his time at Princeton. It's popped up a few times lately in relation to random bits of Das Binky's life.

In the great big dining hall with stained-glass windows, where we always ate, in our steadily deteriorating academic gowns, Dean Eisenhart would begin each dinner by saying grace in Latin. After dinner he would often get up and make some announcements. One night Dr. Eisenhart got up and said, "Two weeks from now, a professor of psychology is coming to give a talk about hypnosis. Now, this professor thought it would be much better if we had a real demonstration of hypnosis instead of just talking about it. Therefore he would like some people to volunteer to be hypnotized.

I get all excited: There's no question but that I've got to find out about hypnosis. This is going to he terrific!

Dean Eisenhart went on to say that it would be good if three or four people would volunteer so that the hypnotist could try them out first to see which ones would be able to be hypnotized, so he'd like to urge very much that we apply for this. (He's wasting all this time, for God's sake!)

Eisenhart was down at one end of the hall, and I was way down at the other end, in the back. There were hundreds of guys there. I knew that everybody was going to want to do this, and I was terrified that he wouldn't see me because I was so far back. I just had to get in on this demonstration!

Finally Eisenhart said, "And so I would like to ask if there are going to be any volunteers . . ."

I raised my hand and shot out of my seat, screaming as loud as I could, to make sure that he would hear me: "MEEEEEEEEEEE!"

He heard me all right, because there wasn't another soul. My voice reverberated throughout the hall--it was very embarrassing. Eisenhart's immediate reaction was, "Yes, of course, I knew you would volunteer, Mr. Feynman, but I was wondering if there would be anybody else."

Lately, I feeling like that guy A LOT. Which is fun in it's own way, but come on, people... catch the fever! (And read Feynman. And come see Fountains of Wayne or Louis CK with me.)

Huh?

2009-04-17T19:02:00.002-05:00

L: "Daddy, I love going to school because it's so much fun and we get to play with the teacher and recess and art and library time and we have play stations and I like the MagnaCorner where there's lots of cool magnetic stuff to play with and I made a chicken but it wasn't hard for me because I'm really smart and when I grow up I don't want to get married because I'd be really embarrassed with all of those people looking at me and I really liked the spaghetti we had for dinner can we have the leftovers tomorrow?"

Daddy: "Umm, Yes."

Defining Maturity?

2009-04-16T19:33:00.003-05:00

This evening, we were sitting around watching Reading Rainbow. It's a new addition to the Tivo regimen, and one of the few live-action kid shows in the rotation.

L was looking particularly engaged by an animal-related episode.

Daddy: L, you like this show?
L: Yeah, Dad. I'm starting to like boring shows.

At first, I thought this was a nice bit of biting sarcasm. But then she went on to explain that when she was younger, she would have found the show really boring, but her tastes had evolved such that she enjoyed it.

I figure NPR can't be far behind.

In another kid-related bit of fun, Ms. Das Binky is out of town for a few days in Chicago. I was home from work today with DD, who had a bit of a fever. We took advantage and did some shopping. One of our stops was Costco.

DD got really excited about going to Costco. And while Costco is awesome, it's not the response I expected from a three-year old. When I asked why, she said "We'll see Mommy!"

So, then we had to have a discussion about the idea that Chicago and Costco, while sharing common first and last letters, were in fact separate places. She looked a little crestfallen, but rebounded nicely when Wall-E was showing on 25 separate LCD TVs.

Happy Go Lucky: A Quick Review

2009-04-07T10:56:00.003-05:00

Several bad signs for any movie:

Ten minutes into the movie, I want to punch the female lead in the face. Repeatedly.
40 minutes into the movie, I look at the running time on the DVD player and yell "JESUS CHRIST, WE'VE BEEN WATCHING THIS MOVIE FOR 40 MINUTES AND NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET!"
Eighty minutes into the movie, I want to punch the female lead in the face again. Harder.
One Hundred minutes in, you realize that the genre listed here is "comedy" but you have yet to so much as crack a smile.
You realize the most sympathetic character in the movie was the violent, racist one.

Well, that was Happy Go Lucky for me.

I'm a big Mike Leigh fan. I've seen and enjoyed most of his movies, and I love the naturalistic way he works. His movies tend to be more character driven than plot driven. Unfortunately, I hated most of the characters in Happy Go Lucky.

Sally Hawkins (who has been universally praised for her role, and won the Golden Globe) plays Poppy, a freakishly peppy and optimistic twit of a primary school teacher. Poppy just wanders through life trying to infect people with her joyful outlook. That's the plot. Her worldview comes across more like a minor form of mental retardation, and in fact it took me 20 or 30 minutes to decide that the character wasn't autistic or something.

It isn't much of a stretch to say that nothing actually happens in the movie. The main plot streams are "Poppy dates a guy", "Poppy takes driving lessons", "Poppy take dance lessons" and "Poppy chats with a homeless guy". A lot of the scenes are unrelated. Almost none of the characters actually change. The entire movie is Poppy going about her life, more or less unaffected by anything she sees. Now, I'm fine with plotless movies... I count Before Sunrise among my favorites, and nothing happens there. But the key was that I liked the characters. I couldn't stand Poppy.

The one interesting character / thread in the movie to me was her driving instructor, an angry, repressed guy who probably reads a lot of Ayn Rand. Though he wasn't a likable character, he had an intensity that drove the scenes he was in.

Since I saw Happy Go Lucky a few weeks back, I've read a whole battery of other reviews from professional critics I respect, and they all loved it. I can't remember having such a wide disconnect with so many of these folks on any film. It's obvious we watched the same movie, and to some degree the success of the movie hinged on whether or not you bought into Poppy.

I didn't.

I have no idea whether or not to recommend this movie to anyone. I might be the lone shithead dissing the movie, and you might very well enjoy it. If so, I'd be interested to hear why. But from my end, I've already wasted enough thought on it for now.