Welcome, dear readers, to another edition of “increasingly older man points out how today’s pop music sounds quite a lot like the stuff of his youth”.

Which, I guess, is better than “old man shouts at clouds about how pop music sucks today compared to when he was a kid, not realizing that he’s really not the target market“.

Today, we’re going to talk about Gotye, (which I finally learned is more-or-less pronounced “Goat-tee-ay”, which is derived from “Gauthier”, which is the french version of the Belgian artist’s name, “Wouter”, which could be anglicized as “Walter”, though he goes by “Wally”). Specifically, the song “Somebody That I Used to Know”, which was first released in the States back in January 2012.

This song started popping up on my pop radar a few months back. I kind of enjoyed it; it has a nice ethereal quality and a pleasing arrangement that set it apart from the rest of the stuff surrounding it on the top 40 radio playlist.

It also sounded a lot like the Police. So much like the Police that one could probably get some traction starting an urban legend that it was actually a leftover track from the Outlandos d’Amour sessions in ’78

Everything from the vocal inflections (Gotye sounds very much like Police-era Sting) to the reggae-styled beat to the guitar lines (not as trebly and staccato as typical Andy Summers, but still Summers-esque) suggests a calculated retro vibe, and a definite Police influence.

It seems that the influence drawn most specifically from “Can’t Stand Losing You”:

Same key, almost the same beat and tempo; even the vaguely comparable subject matter of a failing love affair. The similarities are pretty uncanny.

And I’m not the only one who noticed. This post from Lost Things Found hits the issue with a bit more specificity than I touch on here and is totally worth a read. Also, somebody with much more creative skill than I possess made this excellent mash-up of the two tunes that catches the essence of both in a package that’s totally listenable on it’s own:

Mostly, I just wanted to say that “I think that this song sounds like The Police” somewhere other than my car, after which my teenage kid starts with the eye rolling. And yes, it took me over four hundred words to do it, but those words, and the critique and analysis that came along with them. are (at least) half the fun of music appreciation, isn’t it?

So, yeah. I used to do this every week, then I kind of stopped. Not saying I’ll actually get back to doing it regularly, but I’m doing it today. Ten tunes, at random from the music folder on my laptop hard drive (which says I have over 13k songs in it right now; though that *may* be somewhat inflated).

Anyway…

1. “Punk Rock Girl” – Dead Milkmen
2. “Your Misfortune” – Mike Doughty
3. “What You’re Doing (live)” – Rush
4. “Galileo (live)” – Indigo Girls
5. “Please Forgive Me” – Bryan Adams
6. “Southwell” – Julie Schrieber Band
7. “Tiger Rag” – Les Paul & Mary Ford
8. “King of Bedside Manor”- Barenaked Ladies
9. “Somethin To Du” – The Replacements
10. “Bodyelectric” – Sisters of Mercy

Not an awful mix, necessarily (maybe not that Bryan Adams tune. They can’t all be winners). Also, I forgot how much I liked Mike Doughty. I’m going to have to make Haughty Melodic (and probably Skittish/Rockity Roll, because “27 Jennifers” is excellent) migrate to the box in the car some day soon.

You readers listening to anything interesting these days?

As some of you may know, I’ve been spending my Wednesday nights for the last couple of months taking part in a fun bit of participatory storytelling with thousands of others across the country via Wizards of the Coast’s “D&D Encounters”. Encounters is a promotional organized play program that Wizards, the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons, run in gaming and comic shops to promote their game and show off their latest products through beginner-friendly mini-campaigns that play out one scene at a time over the course of anywhere from 8-15 weeks. The setting and obstacles are the same for everyone playing, though outcomes for each group can be remarkably different based on the characters they play and the decisions they make.

I have a bit of a unique perspective on this phenomenon, as my travel schedule for work has me splitting time between two different groups in different cities depending on the week. I’m able to keep up with the ongoing plot as the parties of adventurers face the same challenges, but the experience is different for everyone.

This week marked the beginning of a new session, Council of Spiders. This session’s a bit different that most in the fact that rather than playing a group of heroic adventurers out to save the world from the forces of evil, players are taking the roles of the bad guys. While the group’s overall goal is the same, each character is alligned with one or more factions, each with it’s own agenda toward reaching the endgame, which is often at odds with those of the other party members.

I thought I might try something with this session and post short summaries of each week’s events, both to entertain myself (and perhaps you the reader), as well as keep track of events from encounter to encounter.

To set the stage, all player characters are representatives of various noble houses within Drow (dark elves – often the big bad guys in most D&D settings who live in vast underground cities) society. In this story, three factions have allied (however temporarily) to challenge a larger house in a race to obtain a source of arcane magical power hidden in a lost underground temple.

For this season, I’ll be playing Imogen, a human slave affiliated with House Melarn (inquisitors for the church of Lolth, the evil spider queen goddess). She’s also a wizard specializing in enchantment, which focuses on controlling and manipulating adversaries; she’s built around the general concept of “Hey, let’s you and him fight!”. Being a slave, she’s likely got personal grievances along with her expressed loyalties. Levels upon levels, but that’s really what a campaign of courtly intrigue among the bad guys is all about, right?

On to the summary!

The party begins it’s trek toward the hidden temple, on the heels of another expedition affiliated with other houses set with the same task, but have seemingly disappeared. The goal is to overtake or disrupt the other group (assuming they’re still operating), and be the first to perform a specific ritual at a specific altar in the temple, in order to channel it’s arcane power. As a member of house Melarn, my character (and her two “allies” in Melarn) has been given a secondary, hidden goal by her masters to first annoint this altar with “unholy water” to remove the taint of the other factions before the ritual is performed. I assume this will tilt the balance toward our faction over the others.

The party is made up of Imogen, two drow hexblade warlocks (offensive magic types with summoned melee weapons), each affiliated with a different rival house, a drow cleric (combat medic priestess), and a drow blackguard paladin (heavy armor and heavier blade), both sworn to house Melarn. The party dynamics are tense, though all the drow, regardless of their house afiliation, agree that the fact that they’ve been saddled with a lowly human slave is an insult to their abilities.

Following the path laid out for us, we found ourselves in a large cavern, dimly lit by luminescent mushrooms. The place is littered with the long-dead bodies of previous adventurers. As we proceed further into the space, we’re set upon by monstrous creatures – a colony of cave fishers (large arachnids with long adhesive “tounges” they use to capture prey) and an ochre jelly (a giant amoeba-like subterranean scavenger with acidic excretions).

Thanks to their excellent combat reflexes, the party gets the jump on this very old-school group of monsters. The warlocks and paladin launched charge attacks against the jelly, doing some serious damage (Xune, the mercenary warlock took the time to taunt the jelly first with an infernal commentary, sadly failing). the cleric dropped one small fisher with a spear thrust, and Imogen hung back and took out three small fishers with a single casting of beguiling strands (thanks to some cross training from the illusion school). Having eliminated the entire front line of minions in the first round, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. Little did we know that there was a larger threat hiding in the shadows…

While the jelly was locked down in combat with the paladin, cleric and one of the warlocks, that threat came out of hiding, a much larger cave fisher, who quickly appeared from above and grappled Xune, suspending her above the floor of the cavern. Imogen fired her eerily accurate magic missle into the fray, doing a small amount of damage to the big fisher. The snagged hexblade managed to escape the grab via clever three-dimensional application of the drow’s cloud of darkness, covering the enemies in an obscuring mist, preventing them from seeing us.

The big fisher swung wildly in our direction but missed, and quickly disappeared from view, (it’s natural defenses allow it to become invisible), while the severely injured jelly quivered, and split into two smaller, more maneuverable copies of itself and pressed the attack, though the cleric and warlock quickly dispatched them. Imogen, for her part, cast a powerful spell blindly in the direction the cave fisher was last seen, and managed to overcome the creature’s camoflague and mental defenses, dazing it and leaving it still invisible, but more vulnerable to attack; a condition the rest of the party quickly took advantage of in order to gain the victory.

After clearing the monsters, the party follows a trail of blood to find the group of adventurers they were following, dead or dying from injuries sustained in a fight with the monsters we’d just overcome. Thanks to a silver-toungued bluff, a warlock convinced the survivors (victims?) we were a rescue party. They told us that just as they were set upon by the monsters, one of their own betrayed them, charging ahead and leaving them to their fates. After they shared their information, Imogen’s brutal drow compatriots put the injuried party out of their misery for the glory of their masters, and pressed on toward the goal.

And that’s it until next week!

As a geek and general fan of science-ey and space-ey things, I understand the significance of Neil Armstrong’s passing this weekend. The first man who walked on the Moon; the man who did that big momentous thing so seemingly effortlessly (other than managing to miss an “A” in his big moment in the spotlight, anyway); one of the few people out there that can uncategorically be called a “Hero” regardless of the political or ideological bent of the person doing the describing is gone from us.

It is, as they say, a big deal. I happened to be surrounded by a pack of nerds on Saturday evening when the word got out, and you could sense the shared feeling of loss among us in the occasional lulls between the dick jokes on stage. One of the highlights of the particular musical comedy show I enjoyed on Saturday was the surprisingly touching rendition of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” that Paul, Storm, and Mike Phirman did; clearly thrown together at the last minute, but amazingly well done, and played completely and utterly straight. It was one of those moments, and I’m glad I was there to be a witness to it.

At the same time, though, I feel detached from things. I was born in 1974, two years or so after the last of the Apollo missions. In my lifetime, no one’s ever been back to the moon. In my lifetime, astronauts are still amazingly cool, but rather than amazingly cool guys who go “where no man has gone before”, they were mostly amazingly cool truck drivers who haul satellites up to LEO and not much else. My generation’s big shared space memory isn’t “One small step for man…”, it’s watching the Challenger blow up a few minutes after launch, and flinching after hearing “Throttling Up…” in every subsequent shuttle launch until the last one.

Let me repeat that. “The last one”. Not to downplay all the cool robots and stuff we have beaming data about the universe back to us (and those are VERY cool), but as I type this, the space program that put a guy on the moon with less tech than I have in my pocket right now doesn’t have a vehicle of it’s own that can send a human being into orbit. We need to hitch a ride.

For all the excitement and positivity and optimism brought on by the amazing achievement of putting Armstrong and company on the surface of another world, people born just a few years later have no comparable experience to look toward. That “one giant leap” into the future of space travel, never really went anywhere. We were supposed to be living on Mars and mining asteroids by now. Instead, we’re struggling to keep up with the rest of the world in math and science education, and having supposedly serious arguments in the public square about questions about our biological origins supposedly settled 150 years ago.

Granted, we’re having those arguments across time zones using amazingly complex and compact communications technology that’s honestly more advanced than anything Star Trek writers projecting 400 years in the future could come up with. But then, they were also writing about exploring the galaxy in city-sized spacecraft – I can forgive them the analog displays and radio hiss – in those writers’ present, the zeitgeist was pointing out to the stars, not shrinking computers down so they fit in our pockets and can access the sum-total of human knowledge and cat pictures with silly captions (though I’ll admit that’s a pretty cool thing to have).

I’m saddened by Armstrong’s passing. It’s a big deal from a historical perspective. It’s also a historical artifact. It was a huge launching point for humanity, and we kind of passed it by; a giant missed opportunity. Maybe someday we’ll get back on track to the stars. Curiosity is an amazing acheivement that’s got a lot of people excited again. Private sector launch efforts are on the cusp of becoming a reality, perhaps freeing up great minds to work on neat aspirational ideas again, rather than dealing with the mechanics of getting out of Earths’ gravity well. I hope so. I like to think Armstrong did too.

A week or two ago, dark cargo suggested the idea of a Books That I’ve Been Meaning to Get To “Pah-Tay”, in which we all take a few hours and you know, get to a couple of those books we’ve been meaning to read for who knows how long, and post a few of our thoughts on a few of them.

I tried, dc. I tried, but ultimately I failed.

I got somewhat distracted by life, family, live music, rain, and George R.R. Martin (It turns out A Dance With Dragons just couldn’t wait), and I never actually got to spend a lot of time actually digging into those aspirational books (though I did manage to get around to finally obtaining a copy of at least one of them) in the general time frame suggested. So, this list is going to be at least partially “books I’m still meaning to get to”, though in those cases, I’ll talk about why I really mean to get them and will honestly remember to grab a copy the next time I’m at a bookseller or library.

If nothing else, by naming names here, I will be proclaiming publicly my intent to read these volumes, which I hope will serve as a reminder to actually do so.

In any case, here’s my list:

♦- Snow Crash – Neil Stephenson: This book is, along with Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the founding texts of cyberpunk, and has informed so many other works in a wide range of media that I’ve enjoyed. Without this book, there’d be no Ghost in the Shell, no Shadowrun, and certainly no The Matrix. Sure, there were previous antecedents to technologically advanced, corporate dominated dystopias and the hackers that navigate them, but without this book, those sorts of stories (and in fact, the way we talk about the internet and stuff in the real world) would probably be very different. And, I still don’t own a copy. There’s a huge hole in my science fiction geek experience: I am almost wholly ignorant of the adventures of Hiro Protagonist in the Metaverse. I just know that there’s some element or pastiche in one of those other cyberpunky works that I’m missing, and as such, not getting the most out of the experience. Every time I’ve been in the bookstore for the last fifteen years, I either forget to grab a copy, or if I do remember, it’s always out of stock. I really need to remedy this soon.

♦- The Qu’ran: You hear the words “Islam” or “Muslim” in the news every day. A vast swath of Americans think of adherents of Islam as mortal enemies that “hate our freedom”. This hugely generalized perception is, of course, largely worng, and flies in the face of my personal experience with people of the Muslim faith, and probably yours too, assuming the topic of religion even came up. In any case, as much as one hears about Islam, your average American doesn’t know much about the religion. I’ve had some exposure to it through my education in the social sciences and world cultures, and have a vague understanding of the theological high points, but I’ve never taken the time to actually read the religion’s sacred text. The big reason why I haven’t so far is that I’m kind of intimidated by the undertaking, because I’m afraid that simply reading it cold, without context, I’m going to miss a whole lot (witness last year’s aborted attempt to pore through the I Ching). Perhaps along with the text itself, I need to find a few more resources dealing in commentary and context. In the meantime, this weekend I downloaded an electronic translation to my second-hand kindle, so it’s there waiting for me.

♦- DC Comics’ Legion of Superheroes: If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a bit of a comic book guy. My go-to passion in this area is probably Bronze Age Marvel Comics, though I’ve done a fair bit of reading on the history of the medium, and am at least slightly familiar with the high points from the 1930s on through the present. One title that comes up over and over in comic book histories as important and influential, and one that is spoken of most fondly by friends and acquantances who favor the “Distinguished Competition” over than the house that Stan and Jack built, is The Legion. I’m a bit embarassed to say that I’ve never read a Legion comic. I recently procured a collection of scholarly essays on the title, Teenagers from the Future,, and have been slowly working my way through it, and learning exactly why so many people have such fondness and dedication to this book about a club for teenagers with often bizare superpowers living in the 30th century that’s been cancelled as regularly as it’s been published since it first popped up in the mid 1950s. Based on this research, I suspect I’d enjoy it a lot; this book, by virtue of it’s setting and middling readership was able to take a lot of chances that the big guys like Superman and Batman couldn’t – early experiments with continuity, non-reversable character death, and gender and orientation issues, well before such things were commonplace, using ridiculous characters like Matter-Eater Lad. I guess I need to go grab a couple of those Showcase reprints.

♦- The Real Frank Zappa Book – Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso: The guy I took guitar lessons from in middle and high school was a huge Zappa buff, and his enthusiasm planted a seed that I’ve watered on-and-off since then. I’ve listened enraptured, amused, and often humbled, to Zappa recordings over the years, and have added a few to my collection. When most people think of Frank, novelty tunes like “Valley Girl” and “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” are at the forefront; but his prodidgious output was quite a bit more varied and complex. Sure, he wrote songs that were often profane and offensive, but rarely are such novelties so painstakingly constructed and performed. He’s best known as a long-haired rock guy, but one of his biggest influences was classical composer Edgard Varèse, he was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame (as well as the Rock Hall), and testified eloquently before the US Congress in defense of freedom of expression and against censorship. There’s a lot there for a student of music and culture to dig into here, is what I’m saying. A few years ago, I read Barry Miles’ biography of Zappa, and was intrigued by the man, his work ethic, and his way of looking at the world. Of course, he also came across as a bit of an asshole perfectionist. I don’t doubt that there’s some truth to that, but I’ve always wanted to get a second opinion from the man himself, and this book is probably the best shot there is for that. Too bad it’s been so intermittently available. One of these days…

♦- Let The Right One In – John Ajvide Lindqvist: If you haven’t seen the Swedish film adaptation of this novel, you need to just go out and do that right now. I’ll wait. The American remake, Let Me In, was actually very well done (and Chloe “Hit Girl” Moretz was rather amazing in it), but doesn’t quite capture the inherent bleakness and, well, “Swedishness”, that comes across in the original, and leaves out a lot of the more disturbing elements of this unconventional vampire story. I’ve been told that the original novel, which I’ve had coasting in the perpetual “I’m going to read this next” slot for more than a year (other stuff keeps popping up, as it does), digs deeper into some of the tragic themes of isolation and abuse that the films only hint at beneath the surface of this story of the relationship between a meek and picked on boy and his relationship with an equally troubled child vampire. I am absolutely going to crack this one soon.

So yeah. That’s a selection from the list of books that I’ve been meaning to get around to. There are, of course, many more, but these are the first few that come to mind. I wish I had the chance to actually audition a few of them as was the intent of this exercise, but things like life and Paul and Storm shows I bought tickets for months ago kept coming up. I still feel like I’ve addressed the spirit of the exercise if not the letter, so I’m not ashamed to put this out as my contribution.

Anybody else have similar admissions? Feel free to post them below, at your own space (and link here), or over at Dark Cargo!!

A bit of a stretch to come up with a clever factoid to comemmorate thirty-eight orbits around the sun, but the internet is nothing if not bountiful:

The number 38 was especially prominent in Norse mythology. The number was said to represent unnatural bravery, characteristic of the legendary heroes of Norse sagas. Most legendary sagas were divided into 38 chapters, and the number often recurred throughout stories, with the heroes combating giants or other beasts in groups of 38. The number came to be adopted by the Hardrada clan, and was displayed on their crest in the form of 38 ravens set around 38 outward-facing arrows.

So, happy birthday to me. Perhaps this will be the year I finally slay those pesky frost giants…

50 years ago today (more or less), a poorly-selling anthology comic published it’s final issue, Amazing Fantasy #15. That book featured a story about a teen super hero by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko. You might have heard of it.

I’ve been a comics fan for most of my 37.997 years, and one of the first heroes that ever caught my attention was Spider-Man. I’m pretty sure my first exposure was a book and record set about Spider-Man and the Invasion of the Dragon Men, which led to a life-long fascination with comics that has cluttered up my spare room with boxes of books, toys and memorabilia and earned me more than my share of strange looks from non-geek types. But, it’s really all worth it, because of the enjoyment I’ve gotten out of reading so many good stories, making some great friends in fandom and the industry, and having the opportunity to meet and talk to a couple of real legends of the medium.

Out there on the internet today there are going to be plenty of heartfelt tributes to Spider-Man and what the character means to people – I’m sure most of them echo my feelings – Spider-Man, above all, is accessible. Sure, he’s got amazing super powers and stuff, but at his heart, he’s just a nerd who tries to do the right thing, and often doesn’t manage it, because the problems of day-to-day life get in the way. Readers can identify with him in ways they simply can’t with guys like Batman or Thor, who don’t necessarily have to worry about making the rent or missing their date with the girl who’s way out of their league because the Shocker’s robbing a bank downtown.

For a variety of reasons, I’m probably not going to be as eloquent as most of those tributes right now, but because the stories really have meant quite a bit to me, it just seemed right to add my voice to them.

Anyway, today, Marvel comics published Amazing Spider-Man #692, the issue celebrating the character’s 50th anniversary:

It’s a pretty great book, with a main feature from Dan Slott (one of my favorite writers working today) with plenty of nods to Spidey history, and a couple of fun back-up stories that really capture a lot of the elements that make Spider-Man Spider-Man. It makes a great jumping-on point if you’re interested in picking up on where Spidey’s comic book adventures take him for the next fifty years.

Happy Birthday, Webhead!

Last week, my 13 year old daughter and I were talking a bit about what “the kids these days” are listening to. I’m genuinely curious about these things, having several of my own kids these days, and interacting with others on a regular basis. I also desperately don’t want to become old and totally detached from current trends – they at least deserve a fair hearing before I reject them. I try and remain aware of stuff on Top 40 radio and all (despite the fact that I pretty much listen to public radio – both news and free form these days), and try to keep up, at least in broad strokes.

Through this pattern of observation, I do a pretty good job of staying current, but I’m pretty sure I have one very large blind spot in my reckoning of youth culture: I have no idea what your average middle school tough listens to – you know, that sort of agressive, hyper-masculine niche that, when I was but a lad, was filled by thrash and glam metal – Metallica and Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue and their ilk. That stuff never really got much radio play anyway; but kids still found it, thanks to MTV and rock magazines and word of mouth. For most parents, though, it was underground, except for the laughably incorrect or dated warnings streaming from more conservative pulpits and various moral guardians.

I expect that much of that niche today is filled by hip-hop rather than scrawny guys with guitars. However, the indelible image of the 12 year old social deviant with his first Squier Strat and looking for heroes to emulate still has to exist out there. Who do today’s budding guitar heroes look to for inspiration?

I still really don’t know, but my tentative lines of inquiry through the kid led me to an interesting and ultimately fascinating discovery:

Dear reader, I present to you Black Veil Brides:

Personally, I have a hard time reconciling the fact that the video above was made in 2011 and not, in fact, 1988. The Apocalyptic Cityscape. The Flames. The Costumes. The dual-lead B.C. Rich guitars. The synchronized rocking. It’s glam metal come back from the dead, rising from the ashes of W.A.S.P. and Faster Pussycat. After seeing this video, I went ahead and pulled up a bunch of old 80s metal videos for comparison (and to show the kid): The similarities are indeed uncanny.

I was actually intrigued enough to go out and purchased the band’s latest CD Set The World on Fire; which is pretty damned entertaining, in this old fogie’s opinion. Much of it sounds very old school glam; lots of trashy riffs and old school guitar noodlery. “Fallen Angel” above, is solid arena rock. The staccato thrash of “New Religion” has been rattling around on my mental soundtrack since yesterday afternoon. These young ghouls in greasepaint and leather are tripping all the right nostalgia circuits.

In the spirit of their forebears, the band have glam names like “Christian *CC* Coma” and “Jinxx”, and apply titles to themselves like “The Prophet” and “The Deviant” in the record liner notes. It’s almost like they’re a nostalgia act, but it doesn’t appear that way. The only things that really differentiate the band from their 80s ancestors are the general (and refreshing) lack of lyrical misogyny (they seem more likely to sing about gothy despair than objectifying the groupies) and a more modern gravelly vocal style rather than the high-pitched “testicles in a vice” operatics of decades past. But, lyrics like this are undeniably metal:

We are the unholy
We are the bastard sons of your media culture
Our minds, eyes and bodies were born of your exclusion
And illusion you hide behind

With disillusionment and angst like that on display, it’s no wonder that the stylized logo of BVB is plastered across the t-shirts of kids across the halls of America’s middle schools in 2012. Everything old is, indeed new again.

The best image I’ve seen from the 2012 Olympic Games:

happy birthday, kid.