Matt’s Week in Dork! (9/1/13-9/7/13)

    I started out the week by actually finishing some things.  Yes is the Answer, a sort of oral history of Prog Rock and The Burning Man, Chirsta Faust’s latest Fringe novel.  And the end of the week went crazy with Baltimore Comic-Con, and a visit from Dan and Chris.

Dredd:  A satisfyingly brutal take on the venerable comic character, Dredd finally does 2000AD’s bent sense of humor and grim future justice.  And yes, the helmet NEVER comes off.  Karl Urban makes a great Judge Dredd, with a constant frown and that chiseled jaw.  The villains are nasty, the heroes are nastier.  The violence is weirdly beautiful and the world building is spot on.  For some reason I’ll never understand, this movie did not get anything like the audience it should have.  I’m constantly seeing stuff online from people just seeing it, saying ‘this is so good; how did I not see it before?’  I don’t know.  I saw it in the theater, and had it been there longer, I’d have gone again.  Loved it then, and love it on this second viewing.

Battle In Outer Space:  A pretty good space launch turned alien attack movie from Japan, this is perhaps too slow paced.  Still, in spite of the slow pace and the occasionally meandering plot, I found myself enjoying the adventures of the various characters.  Cool Toho type model work.  It’s not great, and not as wild and weird as some others of the era.  But it’s good.

Mothra:  The argument could be made that this is just kind of a Godzilla clone, with a giant moth instead of a giant dinosaur.  But so what?  It’s fun, it’s well done, and it’s got some cool model destruction.  The King Kong style island adventure in the middle is cool.  There’s a nice twist in the middle.  And the action is solid.

Lords of Salem:  I’m actually kind of impressed by just how unimpressive this film is.  It’s easy to crap on Rob Zombie.  House of 1000 Corpses was a jumbled mess (with a few interesting bits).  The Devil’s Rejects (his best) is uneven, to say the least.  The Halloween remakes sucks (there; I said it; it sucks).  El Superbeasto was absolute garbage.  And now Lords of Salem.  It has a lot of the disorganized, aimless feel of 1000 Corpses, with the yawn inducing boredom of Halloween.  But, it also looks great.  That’s the thing with Zombie’s work.  He does some good stuff.  He works with different cinematographers every time, but always has very cool imagery in his films, which I assume come from him.  But the writing.  It’s just not there.  I loved a lot of the early scenes of Sheri Moon Zombie walking around, and going about her life.  It had a very nostalgic, New England in the early 80s vibe to it that I thought was quite nice.  But otherwise, the movie is just a mess.  I think he was aiming for some combination of The Devil’s Rain and The Sentinel, but he missed the mark.

Hey look.  A goat.

The African Queen:  “Ain’t a thing I can do about it.”  I enjoy the heck out of this light-hearted adventure movie, set against WWI era Africa.  Bogart and Hepburn are two down and out people on the edge of nowhere, who come together with a hair-brained plan to strike a blow against the Kaiser.  We then follow these two down a torturous river and through the fumblings of a budding romance.  I love that the actors don’t look good.  Hepburn is clearly getting older.  Bogart looks like crap.  They sweat, they get dirty, and they just don’t look like movie stars.  Yet, the film is beautiful to look at.  Is it an amazing, life changing film?  No.  But I get why it’s a classic, and I do really enjoy it.

Wrong:  “I only realized that I loved my face after it had been burned with acid.”  Two years ago, Rubber kind of blew me away.  It was so out of nowhere, so strange, so sickly clever that a movie about a murderous psychic tire (yup!) made it on my top ten list.  Wrong is fun, and it’s weird.  But it’s not on the same level.  Sure, there’s plenty of weirdass behavior and strange images.  But while I enjoyed it, I wasn’t blow away by it.

    So, Friday night, Chris and Dan arrived.  Saturday morning…way too early Saturday morning, we hopped in the car and headed to Baltimore, setting up the Warrior 27 table.  We were each able to make various excursions around the place over the course of the day, and I got to see a lot of cool stuff.  This year stood out for me because of the breadth and obscurity of the cosplay.  I was impressed.  Sure, there were a lot of New Who costumes (only one good enough for me to give a pass on the cliché/overexposure).  And there were a bunch of Deadpools (I don’t get it).  But there was a Captain Haddock (from Tintin) for crying out loud.  There was even a couple of ladies doing the nerdy scientists from Pacific Rim.  It was pretty cool.  After the show, co-Dork Brad and our friend Robert joined us for some Mexican at a place not too far from my house.  Too late to bed, and an early rise the next day for Day 2 of the con.  More on that next week, I guess.

-Matt

Book Review: Yes is the Answer

“This wasn’t rock music.  Was it?  It couldn’t be rock music.  It sounded like science.” -Joe Meno page 266

    I was probably 12 or so when I first heard Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.  I didn’t know what it was.  But I knew it was for me.  Considering how well adjusted I am today, it may come as a bit of a shock to readers that I was a pretty weird kid.  Thanks to parents with distinct and different musical tastes, and two much older brothers with different and distinct musical tastes, I grew up in a household filled with a multi-generational cornucopia of sound.  My mom’s taste was rooted fairly strongly in the 50s, with a dash of light classical.  My dad’s in the 60s, with dashes of I don’t even know what.  My brother Tom was into hard rock and punk.  My brother Bill was into psychedelic rock and blues.  And in what turns out to be a blueprint for my life, I sampled a bit of everything and came out with a jumbled mess of a bit from column A and a bit from row 8.  Give me the broken glass rage of Ministry’s Stigmata, the thunderous pomp of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, the smooth sounds of Dean Martin, the tinny pluck of Josephine Baker, or the poppy awkwardness of Kate Nash.  I like a little of this, and a little of that.  And one of the things I like, I found out is called Prog Rock (Progressive Rock).  It was an attempt to take music in a new direction; it was the music that was going to carry us into the future.  And I never realized that like so much else in my life, it isn’t cool to like Prog Rock.

These guys seem pretty cool to me.

    But I didn’t know it wasn’t cool.  And I didn’t know it had a name.  I just knew that when I heard Brain Salad Surgery, my mind was totally blown.  I was just discovering the weird and wonderful world of fantasy and science fiction literature and art, with Michael Morcock, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rodney Matthews, and Frank Frazetta.  And suddenly, it all had a soundtrack.  Soundscapes that carried me to other worlds, flying through ruins of ancient civilizations, battling impossible creatures and machines.  It was as epic as Beethoven, but plugged in.  And I mean plugged in.  It wasn’t just electric, it was cybernetic; like William Gibson’s black ice, hunting me inside my own mind.  To this day, I have never taken any kind of psychoactive drug (or anything stronger than flu meds).  But I feel like I floated through purple haze and ran with Lucy through fields of gumdrops.  When I popped in the cassette (much later, the CD), slid the giant headphones on like a knight's helmet, closed my eyes, and cranked it up…my mind expanded and I felt like the universe opened up.  Matt’s 12 (through 21) year old brain...Blew.  The f*%k.  Up.

    Turns out, I listened to a lot of Prog Rock over the years without ever really knowing it.  I just listened to things I liked.  I could never get into Yes, in the same way I could never get into Mozart.  They were fine on a technical level, but didn’t engage me on an emotional level.  Yet, like Mozart, it was fine to have on in the background.  I lost my taste for Pink Floyd because of the radio.  Genesis because of Phil Collins.  It would take nearly 20 years for me to sit in the Court of the Crimson King for the first time.  But that crazy, classically influenced, science-fiction inspired madness kept bringing me back.  I think perhaps it was because I grew up (musically speaking) after Prog had its day, I listened without baggage, without expectation.  I could hear a band’s entire output in an afternoon or day, and pick what I liked and what I didn’t, without having to wait a year for a new album; without having to face disappointment.  I didn’t have to live through member changes or directional shifts.  It was just there, laid out before me in toto (and yes, sadly even in Toto).  Growing up with such diverse musical tastes surrounding me, and never feeling connected to people my own age, I was used to being outside my own generation’s taste norm.  To this day, I just hate the 90s.  Yes, absolutely, there are some exceptions.  But musically, I think the 90s is one of the worst times in the history of ever.  It was the music of my high school career, and yet, it was never my music.  And while I eventually experienced a certain nostalgic joy with 80s music, even the stuff I used to hate, the 90s still exists as a psychic vampire, draining my hope and will to live.  There isn't enough bleach in the world to get rid of the Grunge.  So, I never had any kind of shame, or any idea that I should have shame, for loving Prog Rock.

Nothing amiss here.

    I bring all that up, because when I picked up Yes is the Answer, I was hoping to get a good solid understanding of the subgenre, its history, and its legacy.  But, for a good part of the book, what I got was sheepish, foot staring monologs on how ‘it was a different time, and I was young;’ diatribes on why Prog Rock sucks.  Admittedly, some of the essays are quite amusing, self-effacing, and biting.  Some of them also feature interesting glimpses into different times and different places.  The youngest writer seems to be about my age, the oldest somewhere between my brothers and my parents.  They come from places like Spain, England, and California.  But wherever or whenever they’re from, they seem to know that liking Prog Rock isn’t cool, something you shouldn’t admit, and its an embarrassing part of their neurotic pasts.  Each chapter is written by a different author, and their backgrounds are very disparate.  Male and female (though, as almost every writer points out, heavily biased toward the male side), some were in bands, some journalists.  Many are novelists.  But most of them have one thing in common, they don’t like Prog Rock.  Most of them did at one time, or knew someone who was really into it.  Only a couple seem to enjoy it in any way now.  And that’s sad.

Chicks dig a flute player in makeup, right?

    If you’re interested in essays about how music effects our lives in countless ways, about the scene in the late 60s through the early 80s, about growing up and burning out, coming to terms with age, this is a good read with some sad bits, some angry bits, and a lot of very funny bits.  If you’re looking for a celebration of an over the top and grandiose subgenre of music we now call Prog, this ain’t it.   Most of the essays are well written and fast moving.  A couple turned out to be slogs.  And I did get some interesting history, as well as a few new bands to check out.  But it’s overall a mixed bag, and not just because it’s an anthology of essays.  While not nearly as rage inducing, the book smacks of hipsterism, which is the pop-culture equivalent of Communism in the 50s, so far as this cat is concerned.  I can't really recommend it, but I wouldn't advice against reading it either.

Yes is the Answer and other Prog Rock Tales
Editors: Marc Weingarten & Tyson Cornell
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
ISBN: 978-0-9854-020-1

-Matt