Squublog

(Possibly, though not definitely, the first or second entry in my Musimembering series.)

Right now I've got 2 Yes albums in my iAudio (mp3) player: Talk, and The Ladder. It's a pretty random sample of my collection of Yes stuff, which is by no means complete but contains more than just those 2 records. In fact it's a pretty random collection, as I've never gotten onto a "let's try to buy all 17,000 Yes records" kick.

Talk is from 1994. Trevor Rabin's featured heavily. AllMusic.com calls the album "A Disaster," which I don't get. Being only a casual Yes fan, though, perhaps I'm not qualified to recognize a disaster.

I've always like Trevor Rabin, his vocals, guitar playing, and song writing, although the latter can be pretty hit-or-miss for him. I've got a suspicion that Yes fans probably never took to his very 80s style of music-making, but I did. Of course I'm one of those people who didn't get into them at all until 90125, when Rabin first joined the group.

Talk is not a fantastic album. For me, the Jon Anderson tracks are the weak spots, like "I am Waiting," which is just too floaty (as he tends to be a lot of the time,) sort of light and airy and I just picture a roller skating rink and a disco ball. It's a good album though, with a few stand out tracks like "The Calling," "State of Play," "Walls," and some very strong production throughout. Lots of interplay between heavy bass and rhythm stuff and acoustic guitar strumming. The acoustic guitar sound is of a kind that I sometimes really hate, using piezo pickups instead of more traditional old-fashioned putting a microphone in front of the instrument. There's a cold, unnatural feel to guitars recorded like that, and it rarely works for me. Somehow Yes does well with that sound. (In fact I'm not even sure they're acoustic guitars and not electrics with piezo pickups - I never can really tell the difference.)

I barely remember the circumstances around my buying this CD, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't long after its release. I enjoyed it a lot on the first few listens, probably for the most part due to the production and sound. There are lots of good harmony/backing vocal things throughout, and Rabin's a big part of that. Additionally, there's this sort of epic 3 part thing (I think it's maybe what'd be the 2nd side if this were on vinyl or cassette,) called "Endless Dream," the middle bit of which is the title-track, is over 11 minutes long, and still blows me away. While I'm a sucker for long tracks, it takes more than only that to get me. This one's got some great interplay between mellow piano and atmospheric guitar work. It also features lead vocals by both Anderson and Rabin, using both of their melodic strengths. It does veer into that light-airy Anderson stuff at times, but that's well balanced by the rest of it. About a quarter of the way in there's some chill-inducing stereo guitar work, filling in with that beautiful rhythmic backing-vocal stuff from Anderson, recalling some cool moments from 90125.

The last quarter of the track opens up into full-on progressive mode, from droning synths to vast vocal chorus work, including Anderson's voice soaring way up there where a lot of people can't stand to listen to it.

Continuing to be out of order. I'm somewhere in the middle-beginning of my "experiment." Don't know right now how much I've explained it. That's neither that nor this, nor there. Anywhere.

I have a gradually deteriorating collection of music. It's clear to me that I've reached, and long since begun the descent from, the pinnacle of my music collecting days. I still buy CDs, download stuff from some independent sites like DMusic, trade rips of stuff with friends (did I just say that out loud?); but it's nothing like it used to be. My buying/attaining now is always sporadic, never focused (sound familiar?) and just not as satisfying as it once was.

Still, on occasion I'll pull out something old to listen to and think about how I ought to write something about it. Never settle on what exactly I'd write, as reviewing music is a skill I've never worked on hard enough to even figure out, let alone master. Sometimes I think I'd just like to write about where I was when I got my hands on the thing, or when I first heard it. That wouldn't always work, though, as sometimes there's not much to tell related to that.

This "Musimembering" thing is something to do with that. I don't know if I'll keep it up - I'm buried in half-started projects to which I can't do justice, including this blog itself, and just writing this introduction (as well as the first example, which is pretty weak, and which will probably appear tomorrow,) is eating into time I really shouldn't be taking up with this garbage. Of course the way I am I'm going to want to keep doing these all RIGHT NOW, taking up more time, and burn out the idea quickly while wasting time better spent elsewhere. We'll just see what happens.

So excuse the first entry or two, I've had to start somewhere by way of diving in, and I'm certain I chose a pretty boring entry point.

Dear Gramby,

I have a plastic, blue (blue, plastic) garbage receptacle here in my home office. I've got these flimsy blue, plastic (plastic, blue (flimsy)) garbage bags that I use for it. They are just exactly that much too small for the can. I'll get 'em in there pretty good, and they seem to be just about right, until I've gotten a decent amount of trash (plastic crap from fast food, cans (yeah, I know,) paper (yeah, I know,) cardboard (yeah, I know,)) into it, at which point I inevitably notice that the bag is somewhere down in the can and all the sticky crap is wherever it wants to be in there, in utter disregard for the bagness of the bag.

I have another box of plastic garbage bags that are ever so slightly too large for the can. Those are better, but more expensive. When I use those, the can gets full but when I remove the bag there's extra space, and I hate wasting them (yeah, exactly, right, wouldn't want to waste any extra garbage bag space when I could save it to throw away more shit I should be recycling,) so I leave them sitting around until I fill them. In sitting around, of course, they aren't in the can anymore and they spill their sticky contents all over the carpet.

Up the Shit without a Bag,
I, Squub

So what, exactly, is this grand bumpity that you may or may not have been reading about? How's it work?

Good questions. I'm trying to figure that out even now, in what is, chronomologically, the third in the series. If it's a series.

There are a couple of ways that this could go. My usual method would be to make it as obtuse as possible. Is it a month of posts? (I've done that before, but this, obviously, would be that PLUS added hot sauce.) I could do it backwards: this would be the last post. But since I've already started, that doesn't quite make sense. So I'd sort of like to probably do it completely out of order. Still leaving open the question, for now, of the exact duration, I'm posting some block of entries to the future. The first post I did like that was destined for June 18, 2008. For some reason that doesn't feel far enough into the future for me. To make it really interesting I'd shoot for a year out, and do a full year of posts.

(Yes, I'm waiting for the laughter to die down.)

Yeah, I can't possibly set myself up for that kind of failure. That'd be dumb. So let's say we're going to end this thing on 8/8/8. It's a big date for a few persons I know, not the least of whom being our beloved Kingo, who may make a few appearances in this play. This won't be that post; I'll know it, I hope, when I'm writing it.

So where's that leave me? I could try to fill the space between June 18th, 2008, and August 8th, 2008. How many days is that? (I'm running out of now-time to finish this post. Dammit.) One month, 21 days. Hardly seems especially anything. If it stretches out PAST that end date, well, maybe we'll see.

I'm late in discovering that another blogger on another of my blogrolls hung up his (astonished) hat:

Here's this news: Astonished Head is...well, it's finished. I've got nothing more to say here, really, and rather than give the place new drapes I'm just going to shut it down. I mean, it'll still be here, hanging around in the trackless space between pings and packets, but there won't be any more writing at this place. It's been over five years, and I've got other web-based things I want to do.

I enjoyed reading about this guy's recumbent bike ride across the country. This would be where I'd go into more detail were I so inclined. Instead, I'm playing experimenter in a grand parade.

Wouldn't it be cool to start posting things to the future? On Tuesday, March 18, at 3:50pm (though the laptop I'm using doesn't know about the modifications to daylight savings time and so thinks it's still 2:50pm), I'm looking out the window at a pale gray day and a little rain. If this works right, happy b-day, brother o' mine.

...although I can barely remember how to login here. You'll see some number of posts from me in the coming weeks; I don't remember how many. It's all magic and stupid at the same time.

Big, stupid things are also in the works in the land of anonymity that Kingo calls "Pete." Not Pete. Halaka. Whatever. We're going to have to wait for the big reveal on that one (although don't be surprised if I lose the keys to this place beforehand and so nothing shows up on this particular radar screen.) It's hard doing the juggling act sometimes.

So there's a real seed of a post here that I want to go ahead and spit out before I forget about it. I've seen three movies, actual movies at actual movie theaters, in the past three weeks. This is astounding. Since having our daughter (who should be having a younger sibling arriving on the scene in December,) we've not had much time for things like going to movies. But lately we've been foisting our handful-of-a-daughter on my parents so that we can waste time the way we used to.

So first we saw that Sex and the City movie. My wife's always loved the show. I was dragged along. I don't have much to say about that one right now, except that it probably would've worked better as 2 or 3 episodes of the series.

Following that we saw The Strangers. I was interested in that one based on the previews, and my wife was too, so it was more or less a mutual decision to see it. We were both hugely disappointed. What a worthless piece of crap that was. There's something about recent horror movies that has left me completely flabbergasted as to its popularity. This "let's see how horrible people can be to each other" thing, coupled with absolutely no other plot, is irritating to me, to say the least. There was no point in this movie.

In this case I was surprised also because my usual method for telling whether a movie might be worth seeing or not was completely off. It let me down. I go to Yahoo's movies thing, and see what the average critics rating is. It's not a science, to be sure, but it's usually a pretty accurate way to gauge whether something's gonna be a downright suckfest or not. For this one the method let me down -- the movie was rated at a B- by this method. For a horror movie that's usually not a bad rating. Or at least it wasn't, at some point. I think.

After seeing it I read quite a few of those reviews, and was astounded. Most of them seemed to be giving it a higher rating than B-, and none of them seemed to care that there wasn't a plot.

So tonight we saw the new Shyamalan film, The Happening. I liked it. I actually liked it a lot. It's possible that I'm going to be on my own little boat about this movie, based on my subsequent reading of the critics linked on the yahoo thing. First, this one got a C average rating. That's insane, especially when compared to the rating for The Strangers. This movie was better than that one in any metric I can think of. Second, though, even the critics who liked it (this review is the closest to my perspective on it as I've found) aren't remarking on what I was looking for discussion about. And of course I, being roughly hewn and rarely practiced in the arts of film criticism, won't be able to say anything much intelligent about the subject either. But I'll give it a shot all the same.

The movie was weird. It was weird on a lot of levels. It was surreal. It didn't even remotely resemble other movies that might be considered to be in the same genre (it was sort of an end-of-the-world tale with no resemblance to recent other examples of that style.) The entire time I was confused about a question I couldn't even formulate very well to myself; the closest I could come was to whisper to my wife, "I can't even figure out what kind of movie this is."

Some things in the reviews I read could be maybe pieced together to get some kind of a picture of what I'm talking about. The acting was in some way like B-movie acting. Mark Wahlberg struck me as if he was playing the part of the character he played in Boogie Nights acting in a "real" movie, instead of a porno. John Lequizamo kept reminding me of somebody else that I never put my finger on.

Nearly every scene left me feeling like something was slightly off. In a good way. I think maybe it was the contrast to other Hollywood films. There wasn't all that quick-cut shit I've grown to hate. There was a sense maybe that this was the way people might act in a play, or maybe the way people might behave in real life.

Then there's the issue of the humor. One reviewer said something about the humor being "unintentional." Either I'm giving the director way too much credit, or saying it was "unintentional" is just downright idiotic. The movie made me laugh, it made most of the theater laugh. Most of the time it was genuinely hard to tell if the humor was intentional, but it was consistent. It makes no sense to me that this guy, who has shown that he knows what he's doing, could not know some of this stuff would make people laugh.


That humor served to accentuate the gore and horror in what was for me an entirely unique way. I've seen films that have mixed horror and comedy a lot; but either the comedy is over-the-top and obvious, or it's just bad jokes being slung around (the Scream stuff comes to mind there.) This one there'd be a tense situation, and something bad would happen. In a standard thriller/suspense film, there'd be a lot of ominous sound-track cues happening. They all do this... they cue you with scraping strings and weird shit while the camera slowly shows the hand on the doorknob, turning... you know there's going to be something jumping out in a minute and BANG! suddenly something does jump out, and the soundtrack screeches, and everyone jumps. Or they do that and then nothing happens and you relax and then BANG! something jumps out when you weren't quite expecting it but of course you WERE expecting it cuz they all do it that way, too. In this one, between the tension and the bad thing, you'd start laughing. There'd be a couple of chuckles. People would laugh. Everyone's laughing. "Goddamn," you're thinking, "that fat kid just yelled 'bitches!'" at the door. You're laughing and it's a funny scene it's just hilarious holy SHIT what just happened there?

I'm almost willing to call this film genius, because it didn't do anything right. It did everything in a weird way. It was so unusual that I was able to ignore the idiotic "evolution" talk that popped up at one point. Everything was strange, and I never did figure out what kind of movie it was. Sci-fi/horror/comedy isn't right. I almost feel like he was doing a B-movie thing on purpose in a way I haven't seen before.

I love going to a movie and being dumbstruck in this way. In a way, too, I think he played up his reputation as a twist-ending guy. Everybody does twist endings now. This thing put me in a state, for the entire length of the film, where I couldn't even figure out if I was supposed to be trying to figure something out. The weird thing I was trying to figure out really, as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with the actual story of the film. It had to do with the craft.

Anyway, I'm impressed. I don't get why I haven't seen anybody else talking about any of this, except to assume that maybe all of that only exists my own twisted misreading of what was actually done with that film.

I'm really not in it to win it.

A meme has tagged me. That's what they do, right? It's not the people involved who do it, it's the memes themselves.

DaveX at Startling Moniker tagged somebody in this institution; I'm going to go ahead and respond since Kingo ran off into the woods a few weeks back and I haven't heard a peep out of his shed since.

So. Rules:
1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Tag three people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

See there it doesn't say I have to say what book I picked up. I thought, being in my work office when I got tagged, that I'd be giving you a nice 3 sentence romp through some old Oracle reference book, but luck would have it that there was something else in the way. So here ya go:

Why don't other species have art? Once again, the answer that suggests itself--which does not mean that it is proven but only that it may well be provable--is that, lacking language, they lack the tools for creating surrogate stimulus combinations and hence they lack the perspective that permits exploration of the combinatorics of their own senses. Using acute observation and trial and error, Tinbergen cleverly devised the supernormal stimuli that enticed his birds (and other animals) into a host of bizarre behaviors.

Whoever guesses the book gets a big prize.

I have to tag three people. If I've still got three regular readers who are also bloggers beyond DaveX I'd be surprised. But just to piss some people off: Michael (kinda curious who owns the book closest to him,) Sarah (kinda curious if it's a different book,) and Taleswapper (I'm not sure, but I think he might have a book somewhere near him.)

All you others who got left out, your turn's next.

Oh, and DaveX: I think that Cage book you picked up is the one and only Cage book I've got in my collection. Currently it's in a box, with most everything else I used to have time for.

Sorry about the disappearance of Squub. I never meant for it to go on so long.

My webhost had on file a check card that had expired last year. Fortunately for me I hadn't given them the newer card's info; had I done that they would've charged my bank account a bunch of money that I couldn't afford.

So we were squubless for a while. Part of the dark, ugly, secret underbelly of squub is a very exclusive mailing list wherein a small group of imbeciles send useless prattery at one another at random times during the day. That disappeared with Squub. When that happened, one of the denizens of that list nearly disgouged in painful withdrawal. Today, that poor fellow decided he'd had enough, and hacked his way into my billing account and paid the bill. So we're back up, and you've all got to thank only a nameless, faceless benefactor from far distant lands.

I can't name him here for fear that he might not want me to. So I shan't. I thank him overly, but I shan't name here.

In unrelated matters, if you're in the market for some brilliant graphic design work, album covers, advertisement, that sort of thing, or just want to see some great art online, take a peak at Studio Spooky. I've linked there before, but there's always new stuff showing and right now there's a whole ton of stuff to see. Take a look, it's very well worth it.