The Weak In Rock

We bought Ryan a Wii for Xmas.  That is to say, I visited pretty much every mall in the East Bay and eventually found a store that wasn’t sold out of them.  For a day, Ryan thought I ruled.  Then he went back to his usual pre-teen programming.

At first, we like the Wii as a family.  It came with a nifty game that featured simulated bowling.  Karen still rules the roost on that one.  And I am the all-time home run champ in the baseball game that is on the Wii Sports disk.  Fun.

Then darkness fell.  Or should I say, Ryan bought Guitar Hero.

I’d messed around with Guitar Hero before but never really tried to play it.  Suffice to say, I rule at virtual guitar slinging.

There’s one problem.

The consensus among my fellow musicians is that if you’re a halfway decent guitar player in meat-life then you’ll blow goats at Guitar Hero.  Oops.  I’ve beaten the game on the easy level and am 3/4 of the way through it on medium.  I even got a 300 note streak on Metallica’s “One”.  Crap.

I’m a hack.

Side note - pretty clever on the part of the makers of Guitar Hero to fill it with classic rock anthems.  Way to keep The Kids ™ on the straight and narrow musically.

Side side note - I unlocked the video of John Lydon and Steve Jones talking about rerecording “Anarchy In The U.K.” for Guitar Hero.  Advancing age has turned Johnny Rotten into a softy.  The man admits to his gaming addiction in the video and that he loves Guitar Hero.  I would pay real money to see John Lydon rocking out to “Slow Ride.”

Technorati Tags: Wii, Wii Sports, Guitar Hero, Metallica, John Lydon, Steve Jones, Anarchy In The U.K., Johnny Rotten, Slow Ride

New year’s resolutions mostly don’t do me much good.  I’ve managed to keep what I think are a grand total of 2 of them in my lifetime.  However, one that I kept was my resolution to ride a century in 2007, so I might as well have one this year too.

I’m going to write more than I did last year.  This blog dropped off the face of the earth in the latter third of 2007 due to a change in jobs and me spending a lot more time playing music than I have in a really, really long while.  I have a few fans out there (and a few is all we can really hope for) and doing this is good for me, so while I’m not setting any specific goals I do plan to post here more often and write more often in general.

Happy new year everyone.  Let’s hope it’s a good one.

One does not typically expect to be bedridden with a 100 degree fever in early August, but this is precisely where I found myself this Saturday. Plans for yard work, long bike rides, trips to Home Depot to pick accent colors for my upcoming interior painting project - *poof* - all in a blaze of nasal congestion, a sore throat and the aforementioned fever.

I was not alone in my misery, mind you. Kid #2 brought the ick home with her from daycare. Kid #1 succumbed to said ick on Friday. So, come Saturday morning when Ryan should have been hatching plans to slay the Morlocks that apparently live in our southern side-lot and I should have been mowing lawns, spraying weeds and contemplating a leisurely ride on my trusty steed, we were both instead pretty much unable to do a lot more than moan and fart.

Many years ago, when I was a bachelor living alone in San Francisco I invented a ritual of watching a favorite movie any time I was laid up by the ick. Back in those days I’d dust off my ill-gotten copy of Citizen Kane and watch it and wonder at how any movie could be so brilliant. Then I’d take twice the recommended dose of Nyguil (mind you, this was back in the day when Nyquil actually contained some semi-powerful pseudo narcotics) sleep until the following morning and be miraculously cured. After dozens of viewings of Citizen Kane I actually grew tired of watching it. I still think it’s the greatest film ever made and will debate this point until my lips fall off with anyone who cares to, but I’ve watched the damned thing now so many times that when I’m in a diminished capacity I can’t enjoy it. I think too damned much when I watch Kane now.

To resolve this predicament and still achieve my trusty miracle cure from my bouts with recurrent Ebola I switched to somewhat less weighty fare several years ago when I bought my first copy of the Star Wars Trilogy. Yes, that’s right. You read that correctly. I said my first copy of the Star Wars Trilogy. The first set I bought was a set of VHS tapes of the original theatrical cut of each Episodes IV, V and VI. Naturally the print used in these copies was inferior, so when Lucasfilm released the restored (and enhanced - as in the set with extra digitally re-done footage) I, being one of those 11 year old boys who saw Star Wars for the first time in a movie theater in 1977 and had my world well and truly rocked by it, had to buy the new set. Of course, this set was also on VHS tape, so when I got a DVD player and the enhanced version of the Trilogy was released on DVD in Widescreen it took me all of ten seconds to plop down my check card at Best Buy and gobble it up.

The next set of Star Wars DVDs I purchased were the second Trilogy - the prequel - Episodes I, II and III. Yes, I too was pained by Jar Jar Binks and the Hop Sing caricatures of the Trade Federation. But must I remind you that I’m a first generation Star Wars nerd. When I saw Episode I for the first time I was so stunned by the gross ethic stereotyping in some of the characters that I almost didn’t like the film. And my companion in the theater was vocal in her dislike of it. But since this was a Star Wars film I went back and saw it again. And without the shock I experienced the first time, I saw the underlying intelligence of the film, and was overwhelmed by the elegance of the fight scene with Darth Maul at the end. In the end I decided that not only did I like Episode I, I loved it. And I loved the other two films in the second trilogy even more, especially the final film whose ending actually made me cry the first time I saw it.

So, I had in my collection all six episodes of the greatest space opera ever told. But something was missing. The DVDs of the first Trilogy were not the films I’d experienced in the theater. Sure, the underlying plot and major characters were unchanged, but George Lucas had used these films to test out ideas and techniques he was going to use in the second Trilogy. Some bits were cool, but some parts were just dorky or downright stupid looking. Then, bless my soul - Lucasfilm released all three original films on DVD in their original theatrical cut with the prints restored. Do I own these? Does the Pope shit in the woods?

So, this past Saturday as Ryan and I suffered under the yoke of microbial terror I turned to Ryan and said, “so, which Star Wars movie do you want to watch?” We ended up watching all three of the prequel episodes in a row. In terms of treatment for our respective infections I’d say this dosage was pretty excessive. To be honest, once Episode III: Revenge of the Sith(damn that’s a cool title) was rolling the closing credits Ryan was antsy as a June bug on a hot frying pan and my brain genuinely hurt, but we both awoke this morning feeling quite a bit better than we had, and darned if I don’t still love all three films. Are they flawless? No, but neither were the original Star Wars films. I am honestly at a loss for why so many people who loved the original Star Wars Trilogy not only claim to dislike the prequels, but express utter hatred, violent hatred for them.

On his new album Patton Oswalt, a man whose work I thoroughly enjoy and a guy I’d love to have a beer with some day, devotes a segment to a bit about how he’s a rotten person because if he was suddenly given the power to travel back in time he wouldn’t stop Hitler or prevent JFK’s assassination. No, he’d go back to the early 1990s and kill George Lucas to prevent him from making the prequels. The bit is funny, but it’s funny mostly because I’ve heard similar sentiments from so many people.

Chuck Klosterman wrote a pretty fine article for Esquire a few years ago in which he talks about the absurdity of people feeling that something as basically abstract as “your country” or “culture” could betray you. And Klosterman rightly points out how ridiculous this is. Betrayal is a horrible thing. Possibly the most horrid thing one person can do to another. It is not, however, something a nation or culture can do to anyone. Star Wars fans, I’m afraid, take their attachment to those first three films way too seriously. They forget that they’re just movies. They signify nothing and are ultimately trivial. Similarly fans of the Sopranos got themselves absurdly into bunched-up-panty-mode when that series ended without any sort of meaningful conclusion. (Of course I can’t fail to mention that the concept of TV series having a conclusion of any sort is a relatively new fangled invention. Gunsmoke ran of a bazillion years and went off the air without anything being resolved. Likewise series like Hawaii-5-O and Marcus Welby, MD. The concept of a series having a conclusion really got traction with M*A*S*H, a show that shouldn’t have had any linear plot to it at all - unless the writers wanted to try to explain why the doctors and nurses of the 4077th had all managed to age 10 years while serving a single tour of duty in a war that only lasted four years. And this concept of TV series having meaningful narrative conclusions should have well and truly jumped the shark with either the premature conclusion of Star Trek: Enterprise, which was wrapped up so neat and tidy it lacked any dramatic interest at all; or the conclusion of Friends where we have to endure the ridiculousness of the breaking open of the damned foosball table to save Joey and Chandler’s pet duck and chick; or somebody should have gotten the point when Seinfeld, a show openly about nothing, was forced to have a concluding episode, which few people got and even fewer people liked. If a show has an actual narrative arc it makes sense for it to have an ending, if it’s just 7 seasons of episodes to fill up a later syndication run then it really can just not have any more episodes.)

Something is all out of whack when millions of people care more about having a conventional conclusion to a TV series than they do about what their country’s monetary policy is, or when our soldiers are going to come home and stop being paid to murder brown people in some third rate banana republic in the middle east. It doesn’t bother me that Patton Oswalt made a joke about wanting to travel back in time to kill George Lucas and stop him from making the prequels. It does bother me that when he says that line in his show it gets the biggest and heartiest laugh of the night.

Maybe it’s me. About once every six months I find myself arguing with someone who wants to convince me that I shouldn’t think Back In Black is the greatest hard rock record of all time because Bon Scott was too dead to sing on it. I don’t make excuses for what I like. I didn’t spend hours a few weekends ago seeking out mp3s of Pat Travers’ records from the late 1970s out of some desire to be weird or overt. I really like Pat Travers. I really like the Star Wars prequels. If someone gave me the power to travel back in time and change one thing, I’d honestly leave it all exactly the way it is.

Technorati Tags: Citizen Kane, Nyguil, Ebola, Star Wars Trilogy, Lucasfilm, Jar Jar Binks, Darth Maul, George Lucas, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Patton Oswalt, Chuck Klosterman, Esquire, the Sopranos, Gunsmoke, Hawaii-5-O, Marcus Welby, MD, M*A*S*H, Star Trek: Enterprise, Friends, Seinfeld, Back In Black, Bon Scott, Pat Travers

Did you ever have one of those days/weeks/months where you feel like any moment someone is going to come up behind you and brain you with a hammer?

Ok, before you start to wonder if your humble narrator here has gone off the paranoid deep end, let me explain.  We mammals, whether your religion allows you to accept it or not, evolved from little critters who lived in holes in the ground.  These little critters lived in perpetual danger of being eaten by other critters.  This grim smiling death tended to come from above, so over the ages we mammals got hard-wired to be fearful of stuff swooping down on us.  We also got hard-wired to be especially nervous and cautious when the critters in our neighboring holes start to get picked off left and right.  This is a big part of the reason why standing in the middle of an open field or a flat prairie makes us excited and energized - our hard-wiring is telling us to get the hell out of there, but it’s been so many millions of years since we needed to hear that message that it gets muddled up and just ends up making us feel exhilarated.

So, why am I feeling like a critter who is about to get gobbled up by some grim smiling death dealer from above?  Because my fellow critters are dropping like proverbial flies, that’s why.

First on the list is my dear friend Jenny, who has been devoured or rent limb from limb, but who has had her share of very, very bad luck lately.  Health problems, unemployment, relationship trauma, driving cross country to take a new job only to find out the new employer had gone belly-up.  Stuff like that.  Jenny even said to me something to the effect of “can you help me find the old gypsy woman I pissed off?”

Next up comes Andy Fredericks.  Andy and I met in 6th grade and spent a few years in high school stirring up, well, the kind of stuff two teenagers stir up in high school.  Andy died recently.  He wasn’t even 40 years old.  I can’t even begin to be articulate about Andy’s death right now.  The last time I saw him we were in our early 20s.  It is therefore utterly impossible for me to conceive of him as no longer living.

This past Sunday one of my co-workers collapsed after crossing the finish line at the Bay To Breakers.  He’d suffered a heart attack and died shortly thereafter.  He was 53 years old.  He’d run the Bay To Breakers before and apparently many other races, which just goes to show that fitness and health are not the same thing at all.  I actually didn’t know him all that well, but I do know his wife, who is also a co-worker of mine.  The two of them were inseparable.  They met at work and from what I know the romance never waned in their relationship.

And for the icing on the proverbial cake one of the guys in my department died this afternoon.  He’d been ill for several weeks and was out sick.  He’d gone to the hospital when he became concerned that this wasn’t just a flu bug and had a heart attack and died there this afternoon.  He was 31 years old and leaves behind a 6 year old boy.

So, you’ll forgive me if I make like a nervous little lemur for a bit.

The larger lesson here is that none of us, when we’re issued a ticket for this little ride here, is told how long the ride is going to be, or how bumpy.  I’m a very lucky man, with an abundance of, for lack of a better term, blessings in my life.  I think I’ll go hug all of them very, very tightly.

Not exactly the line, as we remember it, from Network, but it’s a bit more realistic.

Yes, I know, I haven’t written anything in this space since the last ice-age. Probably managed to set my tens of fans scurrying through the interweb trying to find something else to waste their time with at work. Truth is, I just haven’t felt like writing anything for awhile. So, what, you ask, makes me want to write again? I’m pissed off, that’s what. Yes, pissed off, need to vent and don’t want to trouble my loved-ones with my venomous spewing. Lucky you.

What, you ask, am I pissed off about? In typical fashion, lots of things. Some of them are mundane and, frankly, silly. In fact, that probably covers most of them. But at least one thing pushed me over the edge, and I’ll get to that. Fair warning though - this one’s going to break my rule of not navel gazing within these confines.

First off, who told all these old, washed up rock guys that anyone needed them to reform their bands to tour this summer? This is the rule guys - if your band breaks up it needs to stay that way. There are good reasons for this. The most obvious can be conjured into the mind by just imagining how bad David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen look these days. Put those two on a stage next to each other and you’re liable to cause an epidemic of hysterical blindness. The fact is that old guys trying to look like young guys up on a stage in a sports arena looks horrible.

Of course, as of today the Van Halen reunion is off indefinitely. Any guesses why? Can you say “Eddie Van Halen is a wingnut”? When I read that the VH tour had been “postponed” I actually sighed in relief. That’s right, I made a noise reflecting the release of tension. Why I care about this crap is beyond me, but I do.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. Probably the most high-profile regrouping is the Police reunion. I have to admit that I was conflicted about this. I loved the Police when I was a kid. A couple of my all-time favorite concerts were Police shows. I actually came close to getting my ass kicked by some high school chums because I insisted not only that the Police were a better band than Rush, but that Stewart Copeland was a better and more inventive drummer. As you can see, when it came to the Police during my teen years my brain was clearly disengaged. I was in love. Logic had no business anywhere near my relationship with that band. Heck, I even went to see one of Sting’s first solo tours and convinced myself that it was pretty good. I think back on that show now and realize that I was trying not to laugh through most of his set. But none of my teenage adoration of the Police can make me glad they’re doing this.

When I saw the Police on their last tour back in 1983 it was at a big festival called A Day On The Green at the Oakland Coliseum. The lineup was like the royalty of new wave of the time - The Police, the Fixx, Oingo Boingo, Madness, The Thompson Twins, etc. It was a great show and I paid about $17 for my ticket. If you want to see the Police (and by see, I mean actually be able to discern that the bodies on that arena stage are, in fact, those belonging to Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers) then you’re going to have to shell out around $200 for the honor.

I’ll let you think about that for a second before I comment on it.

Ok, heads up, pencils down. The promoters flogging this “event” at the general public want us to believe that in the past 24 years the opportunity to see the Police in concert has increased in value roughly 12 times. The first thing wrong with this is, again, that Sting, Stewart and Andy are now officially OLD. Not old in the general sense (although Andy Summers is 65, which makes him eligible for senior discounts) but definitely old in the rock & roll sense. The second thing wrong with this is that it means that these concerts are going to be filled with people who probably didn’t really like the Police very much. They just vaguely remember them from their youth. Why do I say that? Because even though they were definitely a bandwagon jumping faux-punk, new wavey band who couldn’t have passed any credibility tests if their lives depended on it in the late 1970s, the Police definitely had an image that made them decidedly unattractive to most of the mainstream kids when I was in high school. Their music may have been straight ahead power pop, but the bleached blond hair and punky outfits made them off-limits to lots of people. Oh, and $200 is just too damned much money for a rock concert, period. If you pay that much to see a band you’re a chump. If you’re in a band and you charge that much for people to see you, you’re a thief. End of story.

But wait, there’s more. Word is that Phil Collins, the single most odious pop star of the past 30 years, has reunited with his old pals in Genesis for a tour this summer. Excuse me while I grab a pencil and destroy what’s left of my eardrums lest I even accidentally hear some of their beyond dreadful music wafting over the walls of a stadium this summer. Ok, I’ll admit that I dig the weird and proggy version of Genesis, regardless of whether it’s Phil or Peter Gabriel singing with them, chiefly because it’s weird and proggy, but the later pop stuff that Genesis did was so syrupy it could choke a honey bee. Besides, even if every single tune Phil Collins did with Genesis was a work of epic brilliance he destroyed any hope that he should be allowed to continue to live and make records with his solo albums.

This really is out of control folks. Crowded House is reforming, in spite of the original band being a trio, one third of which killed itself several years ago. On some level I get it. You’re a musician and you want to perform in front of people. That’s what musicians do. But when you start talking to promoters and record labels they say “who the fuck is Neil Finn and why would anyone want to buy a ticket to see him?” So you call up your old bandmates (or bandmate, in the case of Mr. Finn) and talk them into “getting the band back together.” That way you can tour as Crowded House and promoters suddenly give a damn.

With the Police it’s all about the fortunes of Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. Sting’s doing fine on his own (even if his post-Police music is mega daft). He doesn’t need the Police, but they certainly need him. Same is true for Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford in Genesis. Without Phil no one is going to pay 10 cents to see them. This is, however, not an excuse.

One of the things that makes the Beatles an icon of rock history is that they broke up when they were the biggest thing in the world and stayed broken up. Maybe we have Mark David Chapman to thank for that, but somehow I don’t think so. The Sex Pistols were on their way to that kind of legendary status and then they cocked it all up by reuniting for not one, but two tours. But no one cares. People will flock to the arenas this summer to see every repackaged and aged propped up band that hauls their butts onto a stage. P.T. Barnum was right and there really doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done about it.

The second thing that’s been pissing me off lately is the 2008 Presidential race. We’re well into it already, complete with barbs being flung from one candidate to the other on the Democratic Party side. Hilary Clinton’s team are outraged that she was basically called a pathological liar by David Geffen, who is working to support Barack Obama. Please woman, when Geffen said,

“Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling,”

it may have been the most true statement made in American politics in a decade.

But I really don’t care about this. Nor do I care about the headlong rush by California and other states to mash all their primaries into the first week in February. The whole thing reeks of mefirstism. The candidates are in a hurry to define themselves, get their message out and start beating up on each other. The states are in a hurry to get their primaries over with in order to try to have their state contests be more relevant in the entire primary process. Both will not, in the end, serve the American people one bit.

The candidates are making too much noise way too early. By the time it comes to pick one at the ballot box the voters, myself most likely included, will be sick to death of all of them. The states are being petty and absurd. All they are accomplishing is foreshortening the campaign for the nomination. If we end up with a February 5th primary like the one that seems to be shaping up most of the delegates will be committed before mid-March, which will, in effect mean that we will then have a full blown Presidential campaign between the two major party nominees that will last around 8 months.

I’ll let that one sink in a bit.

That’s right, 8 months of the GOP candidate and the Democratic candidate actively campaigning for your vote. By the time November 2008 gets here we will, as a nation, despise both parties and both candidates thoroughly and completely. Why? Because they’re not going to spend those 8 months holding regular debates and dealing with the issues. They’re going to spend those 8 months insulting each other, looking for dirt on each other and flinging shit.

To my mind there’s two ways to deal with this: 1) switch to a modern, European style campaign limited to 6 weeks. You declare your candidacy and then you’ve got 6 weeks to sell yourself. No more no less. It can be done. With communication technology and transportation the way it is here in the 21st century there’s really no reason why we can’t have all the state primaries and caucuses (actually, it’s time to get rid of that 18th century relic altogether and have people just vote) on the same day. If the general election is on the first Tuesday of November then the Primaries should all be held on the third Tuesday in September. And no more selecting of VP running mates. Whoever gets the second most votes in the primaries is automatically the VP candidate. And if he or she chooses not to stand for that office he or she is disqualified from running for President in the next election. Then the candidates have 6 weeks to make their case, hold so-called debates and may the best person win. No more party conventions either. This business of drafting a platform for the candidates is nonsense.
2) The other option is to have a mandatory quiet period between the Primaries and the party conventions. No campaigning allowed by either candidate until after both conventions are held and they are officially selected as the nominee of their party.

There, now that I’ve solved that problem I’ll tell you why I’m really mad.

I got a lousy review. Really bad. Second worst one of my career, and it’s all because my boss’s, boss’s, boss really has no clue what I do. This person insisted that I be given a low grade because of one isolated problem that really didn’t have much of anything to do with me. Personally, I think if you can’t write a paragraph describing exactly what a specific employee does in your organization then I don’t think you ought to be allowed to have any input whatsoever into that person’s evaluation. But that’s just me.

Technorati Tags: Network, David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen, Van Halen, the Police, Rush, Stewart Copeland, A Day On The Green, Oakland Coliseum, the Fixx, Oingo Boingo, Madness, The Thompson Twins, Andy Summers, Phil Collins, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Crowded House, Neil Finn, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, the Beatles, Mark David Chapman, The Sex Pistols, P.T. Barnum, 2008 Presidential race, Democratic Party, Hilary Clinton, David Geffen, Barack Obama, California