Tip of the iceberg.

It's late and I'm getting more tired by the minute, but this line of questioning was born out of a discussion started between Courtney and myself tonight. Expect much more of this in ensuing days.

Well, okay, technically this all started with one question and kind of snowballed from there. The initial question which she posed to me was who my favorite super hero is, other than Batman. If you read this blog, you probably already know the depths of my bat-obsession (or Bat-session, as I sometimes call it) so that should make the reason for this one qualification obvious. I couldn't immediately answer the question, mainly because I had to take soooo much into account. This, however, led to another interesting question: how do you define a super hero? Technically, there is nothing "super" about Batman, since he is just a mortal like anyone else and has no outside help or powers. This is, of course, much of what makes him so damn cool, but that's not the point. When taking the question into mind, you have to consider a spectrum of a least five types of origins for heroes:

1) Vigilante (no power): Like Batman or The Punisher, even Iron Man, these are otherwise unmiraculous joes who by some usually tragic event turn to crime fighting (or crime, depending on which side they're on), most commonly with some amount of cool weaponry and technology. They are not "super" by nature, but do some pretty damn super stuff.

2) Acquired powers: Spider Man, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four - these are the folks who have had something (usually connected to radiation for some reason) happen to them that has led them to become super-powered. These are once-ordinary people who have developed something that makes them super and then used it to benefit (or harm) the world around them.

3) Innate powers: Folks like most all the "X" teams, The Silver Surfer, or even Warlock were all born or created with their powers intact. Some control them better than others, but that's not the point, the point is they started super and they will always be super.

4) Discovery of Object: Thor's hammer, Ghost Rider's motorcycle, DarkHawk's amulet - all these folks were just normal unassuming folks until they stumbled across some sort of artifact that transformed them or gave them superhuman powers.

5) Cosmic beings: Galactus, Superman, Thanos, The In-Betweener -- these people have some sort of other-worldly origins, and are therefore superior in some way or another to regular human folk.

So where does one draw the line? Can it be said that The Punisher, a gun-toting vigilante is any more or less "super" than someone like Galactus, who eats planets for fun and floats around outer space all the time?
Speaking of Galactus... for people who are even nerdier than I am, here's your shirt.

More comic geekery to come....

Breaking the rules.

That's right folks, two posts in a row written in the daylight hours. I can't say for sure why this is, but I figure if I didn't write one last night, I was due for one this afternoon.

So what haven't I talked about in like a day? That's right: music. More importantly, I am interested in how music affects mood. In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (and in the movie, John Cusack) pose the question "Did I listen to music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to music?" Similarly, in an interview with Charlie Rose the other day, sports caster extraordinaire Jim Nance mentioned putting on songs with specific emotional attachments while he was writing his latest book, which is about his relationship with his father. So this got me thinking along the same lines. Would my outlook on life be different if I liked other kinds of music?

Generally speaking, I listen to what most people would call indie rock. Other people out there would call it crap (Courtney, I'm looking in your direction). No matter what you call it, a major tenet of a lot of the music I listen to is to blend interesting and compelling melodies with bleak lyrics. You know what I'm talking about: bands like the Smiths, The Magnetic Fields, and My Bloody Valentine. So what affect does this music have on me? There is an overused statement that every kid who ever enjoyed punk music says: "Punk rock saved my life." I take great issue with this staement, but that's a whole other post. I only mention it because you never (or at least I never) hear any indie fans say "Indie rock ruined my life." In his book, John Sellers even gives the sub-title of "How indie rock saved my life." While it was an interesting and fun read, I think he is a little over-dramatic in his titling, and I also think that his VERY broad-sweeping definition is rather off base.

But I digress.

Anyhow, I feel like I'm running in circles here. If you have any insight, indie or not, on how music can affect your outlook on life or just your mood in general, please chime in. Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go mope around while listening to some of my favorite albums. Just kidding. Or am I?

Now I remember...

... why I never wake up in the mornings.

As most of you who pay close-ish attention to my posts, you'll notice that about ninety percent of them are written between one and three in the morning. I'm a dyed-in-wool night owl. Have been one for years. Especially now in these salad days of being in school and working a job that allows me to make my own hours, I hardly ever see this side of noon.

This morning, I offered my services to a friend to drive he and his wife to the airport. I thought this would allow me the chance to do two things: first, to finally try Burger King cheezy tots. As I mentioned earlier, if you don't wake up in the morning, it's hard to get to fast food breakfast. Secondly, I had a coupon for some free breakfast chicken sandwich biscuit thing from McDonald's I figured I could cash in.

So what went wrong?

Starting with the trip to the Airport, which in San Francisco is always a harrowing task in and of itself, my morning had already begun to sour. I waded my way through throngs of traffic to get to the United terminal. I see an opening at the curb, put on my blinker and *VOOM* some dipshit in a Navigator comes flying around my passenger side, determined on getting to the curb before me. I try to shake it off, remain calm. I pull my car to the curb, but with the front end angled in, since dumbass Mr. Navigator has given me no room to pull in. I hop out, open the hatch on my car, let the spare swing free, and..... "Sir, don't let that swing out into traffic, it'll get hit!" Up comes trotting the traffic cop/crossing guard who is more concerned with the fact that the edge of my spare tire is hanging some four inches towards traffic than she is with the fact that I almost lost my passenger side mirror to an idiot who left me in this position.

Unperturbed, I soldier on. The promise of cheezy tots gives me a glimmer of hope that all is not lost this morning. So I drive out to Burger King on my way back home. I park my car because I despise drive-thrus, walk up to the counter, place my order for two orders of cheezy tots, and..... "I'm sorry sir, we don't have any this morning." I keep composed, ask how it is that they have run out at seven forty in the a.m. and the woman muttered something about "the shipment showing up and sometimes they put it..." and starts gesturing with her hands about nothing at all. So from what I can gather is either the cheezy tots order wasn't in their shipment that morning, or it was just placed somewhere slightly out of reach from the squad of little old Filipino lady workers who were all under five foot five.

Fair enough, I say. I can just get some hash browns at McDonald's when I get my free sandwich thing.

I arrive at McDonald's, and I'm already slightly cheesed. I hop out of the car, hit the ground running, walk in the front door, look at the menu, and..... "hey, where is my coupon?" Sure enough, somewhere either at my friend's apartment building or the airport, the coupon fell out of my pocket. I even went back to the car to make sure it hadn't fallen out in there. All to no avail. Rather than accepting defeat, I just bought some food so that I wouldn't go home empty handed and empty stomached.

So I get home, sit down to eat my already-unsatisfactory food, flip on the TV, and..... "those of you who love a nice cold beer on a warm afternoon might have to pay a bit more the next time you go to the bar or the store." That's right. By some cruel twist of fate, I just so happen to return home, dejected and completely unfulfilled, in time to catch the "Good Morning America" special report segment on how the price of beer is set to sharply increase before the end of the summer, and how consumers could be paying up to a dollar a pint more for beer in no time. Talk about kicking a man when he's down.

So here I sit. It's ten minutes to nine, I've choked down a cup of the brown liquid that McDonald's tries to pass off as coffee, come to terms with the fact that my beloved Pabst Blue Ribbon might get all the way up to four dollars a pint at my local watering hole, and laid out for you fine folks exactly why I'm cranky. Now, having said all this, I'm doing what I should have done two hours ago: I'm going back to bed.

Suspense.

In the past few days, I've been re-visiting JD Salinger's Nine Stories. It's been a while, and I've been so inundated with Raymond Carver's short stories, it seems like a long time since I've read anyone else's short fiction. Re-reading the first few stories in the collection made me appreciate just how much the short story writer relies on suspense. Even in stories that are generally devoid of mystery, there still has to be a certain something lurking beneath the surface. Carver often referred to it as "menace" though I think you could really substitute terms like mystery or suspense just as easily. Basically, there should be some unspoken, undefined conflict that keeps the reader interested in what is will happen next. The beauty of short stories is that it never really has to surface or be revealed what happens with that threat or menace or suspense.

Now, what I just said there is no news, it's no great revelation. Really, it's kind of commonplace knowledge to your average lit student. However, I recently made a connection in listening to some music while reading short fiction. That connection: shoegaze is just like a short story. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, shoegaze is usually melancholy music that relies on long-ish songs that are constantly building towards a musical climax. My Bloody Valentine fits loosely into the genre, though bands like Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky are probably better fits, at least for my needs in this post. So I came to the realization that you spend time in a short story, like in a shoegaze song, waiting to see what happens next. Most songs you just kind of enjoy them, listen to the music, sometimes sing along with the words, all that jazz. But in shoegaze, you are actively waiting, hoping for that moment when it all hits, and like a good short story, when that moment comes, it hits you like a ton of bricks. I am interested in exactly how it is that musicians are able to achieve this; there's so much more than just hitting a distortion pedal or having the drummer suddenly enter in to the mix at a much higher volume. I think that having a song really hit like that can add a great extra dimension to music, and it shouldn't be limited to shoegaze. Granted, classical composer have been using songwriting methods like this for hundreds of years, but it hasn't really transferred well to the medium of pop music and I'm not sure why. Do listeners lack patience? Yes, some shoegaze bands take just a bit too long to get to the point, but writers can do the same. Filmmakers too, as far as that is concerned. I wonder how much of it has to do with our modern "I want it now" society. The earliest pop songs to hit the radio were limited by the constructs of the record: to fit on a 45, they had to be a maximum length which wasn't much more than about three minutes I believe.

Poe famously described short stories as pieces of fiction that are meant to be read in their entirety in one sitting. What happens with our modern times when no one can sit still anymore?

I are scientists.

Hey kiddies,
I'm going to be brief tonight. We Are Scientists has made the video for their first single "After Hours" and it's hilarious. It also segues nicely with a blog I wrote last week. If you have youtube time to kill, almost all their videos, music or otherwise, are hilarious.

And if you want to go with me to see them in SF, let me know.



Enjoy!

Revolting.

I have to ask: what is it that gives us as the human race that blood lust? Why do we seek out opportunities to see other people get hurt?

It's nothing new. I'm not blaming the Internet. I'm not blaming crumbling family structure. Ever since the days of the Gladiators (and I ain't talking American here) humans have loved watching people or animals get hurt. It's disgusting. Look how far we've come: gladiators, boxing, bull fights, dog fights, cock fights, and now we've come almost full circle with the recent boom in mixed martial arts fighting. Of course, this whole blog is prompted by the new rising star, Kimbo Slice. This dude is scary. Screw those buffed up dudes on NBC knocking Joe Schmo into a pool or shooting tennis balls at them; Kimbo Slice is the closest we will come to a modern-day gladiator. For those of you who don't know, this scary mofo rose to fame via videos of his bare-knuckle fights coming up on youtube. They're disgusting. They're disturbing. They're bloody. I've seen a few and I can seldom stomach the whole thing. It's just nasty. Just thinking about it makes me a bit nauseous. Yet still, for some reason, CBS decided that now he is legitimately fighting, with gloves and a referee in "the octagon" that it would be a ratings boom to stick this guy on network television in a prime time fight. Well, I think the ratings were successful, as millions of Americans got to watch this guy shoot a right fist directly into his opponent's bulging cauliflower ear, causing it to burst.

I just don't get it. How can we as a global society be so enthralled with pain as entertainment? I really think I'd rather watch reality TV, which at least keeps its pain on a primarily emotional level. Even that is problematic: if someone isn't pummeling the crap out of someone else, there is all the emotional pain that "real life" television tries to capture. Why do you think Maury Povich can run seventeen thousand episodes of paternity results??? Simple: it's either heartwarming or heart wrenching. Same with Jerry Springer, a show that has become a parody of itself. People tune in to hear twisted love stories and peoples' perversions, but stay for the possibility of seeing a good fight or some blurred out nudity. Why do we watch all these elimination-based talent shows? It's not because we want to see the overwhelming abilities of the winner, it's because we want to see someone who has much more talent than us STILL get knocked down and stepped on by a panel of snarky talking heads with little to no talent of their own outside of their talent to criticize.

While I'm talking reality TV, I have to ask: what ever happened to Blind Date? I'll admit it, that show was my one main pop culture weakness. If it was on, I'd watch it. Religiously. But part of the reason I enjoyed it was that it knew it was absurd. It knew it was NEVER serious. You could count on great dates that wound up in the hot tub, and awful dates that ended with people getting drinks thrown in their faces. To be even more honest, it would be my dream job to make a living writing all the little wry comments that popped up during footage of the date. Whoever had that job was hands-down the luckiest person on the planet. Plus, Blind Date was the kind of reality TV that knew it's place: in the gutter known as the 5:00 pm time slot when NO ONE watches. I would be happier if I knew it was still there.

97.

Attention: What follows was supposed to be my 100th post spectacular. That is, until I realized I only have ninety seven. The reason for this mistake is that apparently my internal post counter counts drafts as well. So here is what WOULD have been my hundredth post. I'll give it to you now because I pretty much used up my creative juices for the night in coming up with it. Maybe for my real 100th post I'll write a ninety seventh post. You'll just have to wait and see.


Well well, I made it to my hundredth post. In honor of this momentous occasion I will be having a little list fun and giving you five things that have thus far unmentioned in the blog (at least that I can remember). Enjoy, and tomorrow I'm sure I'll kick off post 101 with some gripes about stuff that bothers or annoys me.


1) A worn out zip-up black hoodie: In my opinion, everyone should have one. Especially in San Francisco. This is probably one of the few towns in the US where a bunch of non-hipsters all wear zip up hoodies. Why is this? Because it's the perfect adaptable piece of clothing. It's enough to keep you moderately warm, it can be zipped to the neck if you're really chilly or worn open if you just need a bit something extra to go with your tee. It can be layered beneath a jacket for added warmth, and it has a hood. It might be the most essential article of clothing any San Franciscan can have. Over the past year and a half or so, it has become an unquestioned part of the "Bill look".

2) Rye Whiskey: I have sung the praises of good old mother bourbon on this blog a number of times, now it's time to sing the praises of her peppery, spicy stepsister, rye. Rye never gets its props. You can't get it in most super markets, most bars just have one choice (which is cool, Jim Beam puts out a respectable rye), but when you consider the recent boom in scotch, you have to also wonder why the hell Rye hasn't caught on. There are some old fashioned purists out there who believe that a true Manhattan should be made with Rye; I won't say it shouldn't, but if you ask for a Manhattan, you better assume you're getting bourbon. So why does it get a spot on my special anniversary list? Simple: after MANY years of searching, I honestly thing that it is the best shot to accompany a PBR back. Yes, Jagermeister and PBR is a classic combo, but I find that Rye treats me a lot better, especially if I am getting deep into the shots on any given night.

3) Rice: A recent discussion with my mother led me to the realization that rice is much more of a West Coast thing than an East Coast thing. She honestly prefers egg noodles with a bunch of dishes. I love rice. I can't say that forcibly enough. I love rice. White or brown, as long as it's piping hot, I'm happy. I'll eat it plain, with butter, or, best of all, with soy sauce. In my mind, there is no better starch to be had. You can really eat it with damn near anything too. Just think about it, is there any dish you can think of where rice can't be swapped out for whatever starch you use? Don't even get me started on rice-based casseroles. Or deep-fried rice balls. There are just so many tasty and wonderful options. Damn, I could go for some right now....

4) Chrome Messenger Bags: No, this isn't just because they have wicked hipster cred. No, it's not even because they have those silly belt buckle release systems. It's because they are friggin' INDESTRUCTIBLE. I have had mine for a bit over a year now. In that time I have taken it to school every day, taken it across Europe with me, used it as a suitcase for trips up to the Pacific Northwest, and lugged it to and from the coffee shop more times than I could ever possibly count. It shows NO signs of wear whatsoever. Even the Velcro looks like the day I bought it. I can't say much more than they're one of the best designed and well-balanced messenger bags I've ever seen or used.

5) Indirect lighting: For years and years I toiled under the bright gaze of a ceiling lamp. At long last, I have such a wide range of lighting choices in my humble little abode that I may never need to touch my light switch again (despite the kick-ass Batman switch plate). Naturally, my favorite lighting is the ooooold school Christmas lighting, with those painted-on colors on the bulbs. Their light is so warm, just flipping their switch makes me feel like I'm putting on a sweater. I also have an ancient floor lamp, with the three small bulbs along with one upward facing bulb, all with a dust-ridden lampshade. Plus the old hanging lamp with the wicker shade above the desk, and my little tiki lamp. Even my lava lamps - it all adds up to make a nice ambient glow.