Exile in Guyville

While youtubing the other night, I hit a number of early 90s songs from bands fronted by women. Now, I am generally loath to make a point about singers/band members being male or female. Usually it irritates me. Pandora, an internet radio service I like, has a bad habit of segregating the female bands. So if you select a female led band, you will probably get nothing but female led bands in your playlist. As I said, annoying. Anyway, despite misgivings, here are some really good early to mid 90s songs from bands led by women.

Breeders - Divine Hammer. Everyone loves Kim Deal, and I think it is for the same reasons Boba Fett is so loved. Some people you see and you instictively find cool. So it is with Kim Deal. So much goodness on that particular album. Those merry pranksters set their song about summertime in a snowfield. There is no official video for No Aloha so here is a live version. And we need to throw some Pixies in there, so here's Dig for Fire. Oh and what the hell, I am a nerd so I must link to the nerdiest Pixies song ever, the Happening. Oh for the days when bands sang of the first encounter with alien life.

Garbage - Vow. I generally am not a Garbage fan. I don't dislike them really, but I don't go out of my way to listen. This early song is a real treat though.

Hole - Celebrity Skin. Making fun of Courtney Love is all too easy. So I won't. Instead, check out this underrated song.

Belly - Superconnected. Belly was wrecked by the coming of Fred Durst and his dark tidings of nu-metal. Things went seriously south in popular rock music in the late 90s and songs like this got lost.

Liz Phair - Stratford-on-Guy. If you are relatively young, you may not be aware that at one point Liz Phair was not a purveyor of insipid pop songs with videos that flaunt her good looks. As part of her bad girl images, she now is given to interviews like this one where she recommended her interlocuter get friendly with a mirror. In the past, she made incredible songs with heartfelt lyrics that were true and not cheesy. This particular song is buried on the album but is excellent.

Jen Trynin - Better than Nothing. This one was probably too downbeat for success, with lines like "i'm feeling good, for now, but I know that by tomorrow, I'll probably come around." The video is so 90s with its Slacker vibe. Gas station clerk Jen is really a rocker and while she rocks, the customers wait.

Monday morning links

The Rap Sheet has some good info. It seems Richard Morgan has a new novel coming out (Scroll way down). It is not a Kovacs novel, but it deals with one of Morgan's favorite themes. In this book, we have another technologically created super-soldier who is no longer needed. I suppose this is a evolution of some of hthe questions posed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or even Battlestar Galatica. Anyway, Morgan writes excellent blends of noir fiction and science fiction along with doses of his non-idealistic leftist viewpoint. I am excited for this one.

The Rap Sheet also has an item on Ian Fleming, be sure to read the linked article called Bond in Torment. Also Hugh Jackman is attempting to build an action movie franchise. It certainly worked for Matt Damon.

Portland Metroblogs has an amusing bit on which global conspiracy is dominating PDX.

How would you like to be described as an "adequately excellent lover"? That's how HP Lovecraft's wife described him. Maybe that is why he wrote stories about going insane.

Boba Fett has a blog, not much action on it though.

Extending the trend to cash in on the Young Adult market China Mieville has a new book for the adolecent set.

Fun at others expense

Mario Loyola has become the object of much fun among the left leaning bloggers. Since he is given to making assinine statements, this isn't surprising. Belle Waring at Crooked Timber notes one of his recent gems, where in puzzling over the popularity of Hezbollah, he claims that faced with invasion, Americans would not muster their rifles if Washington said not to do it.

I wonder if anyone has tracked the rise and fall and rise of strength of the outlaw in popular culture in the United States. It takes a number of guises, Johnny Cash's heroes, gansgter rappers, Dirty Harry, everyone in every noir novel, you get the picture. Then we have Dragnet and the forces of order. Both have their adherents in the United States, a point Loyola misses.

Make a nerd happy this year

No right minded nerd (OK, scifi loving nerd, but the overlap is pretty huge) will want to miss The Space Opera Renaissance. This is the gift that keeps on giving, close to 1,000 pages of space adventure stories. The thesis is that space opera began as a term to put down space adventure stories, but was adopted by those who wrote and read them as a banner of pride. The books editors are David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. They also edited Ascent of Wonder, the best scifi collection I have ever read. Flipping through this volume, I saw a lot of good names and spotted a relatively hard to find Iain M Banks tale, which get the right people salivating.

Dropping 1K pages of sf on a non-nerd will get a dirty look, but for the right person this is reading nirvana.

Good airplane book for kids

Most Americans are familiar with the flight stories of the Wright Brothers and Charles Lindbergh. And if you are buying books for kids who like planes, they probably have a Wright Brothers and/or Charles Lindbergh book already. Fewer Americans know about Louis Bleriot, the first person to fly over the English Channel. The Glorious Flight is an excellent children's book about Bleriot's flight. The plane that made it across the channel was called Bleriot XI, because Bleriot I thourgh Bleriot X kept crashing and getting destroyed. So in addition to go a good flight story, you get a lesson in perseverance.

On a recent trip to the Evergreen Aviation Museum (a must see if in the Williamette Valley,) we saw a replica of the Bleriot XI, which someone flew onto the museum's airfield. That is one brave pilot, have a look at the photos. The wheels are bicycle tires.

For kids who need an intro to planes I highly recommend Jerry Pallotta's Jet Alphabet and Airplane Alphabet books.

Veteran's Day

Phillip Carter has a good LA Times piece on heroism and Veteran's Day. Call your veteran family members.

Treats

Today I should limit myself to miso broth. Yesterday was a bit treat heavy. In the morning, the young lads and I visited Bumblekiss. The Willimette Week reviewer wasn't taken with the place, but I quite liked it. The owners were friendly and advised me that the child plate was really big enough for both my kids, which it was. The food choices were interesting and varied. I opted for what has to be the most decadent thing I have eaten in months, eggnog pancakes, with a cheese, egg and bacon scramble on the side. Very tasty but in a subtle warming way. I see that allrecipes has an eggnog pancake recipe too.

Since the wife is out of town I managed to sneak in her least favorite dessert, clafouti. It's a simple prepartaion, you pour the batter over a fruit, usually cherries. The flavor falls somewhere between bread pudding and crepes. I used the recipe from the Gourmet cookbook (the new edition of which comes with a DVD), but left out the kirsch in the batter, which I think was a mistake. It would have given just a bit more cherry flavor. Here are some other recipes for clafouti.

Bring on the body count

I was surprised by the degree to which I liked X-Men 3. The reviews were mediocre and I never get to the theater anymore, so it was almost an afterthought for me. I suppose I was in the mood for a giant mutant fight, which is what you get in the last third of the movie. The movie is not as thoughtful or character driven as the first two, but I found it quite entertaining. A few things stood out to me:

The body count: Dead, lost powers, disappeared, the mutant body count is quite high in this movie. Those who want a canonical movie will be displeased, but it certainly provided for a number of suprises.

The political side: The plot of the movie revolves around a cure for mutants. The creator couldn't stand the fact that he had a mutant son so he developed it to make his son not gay. Ooops. Yes there is a strong subtext about how people treat gays in the movie. You could also read it as fear about Muslims too as Ebert reads it.

The power of the Internet. Juggernaut, one of the bad guys, at one point says to Kitty Pryde, "I'm Juggernaut, bitch," which is a reference to this re-dubbed X-Men cartoon video. Careful with the volume, foul language abounds! Crazy, will we be hearing "Are you laughing be-yotch, Do you find me funny?" sometime soon?

Oh that's lame, that's very, very lame

Well I should have seen it coming. Looks like the Black Christmas remake is going to suck. How, you ask, can I tell? Two things I saw in the trailer. For one, the voice of Billy is not very scary. Sounds run of the mill really. And (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER) you learn the backstory of Billy. You know what? I don't want to know the backstory of Billy.

What makes movies scary is the unknown, the parts of the picture that are left black, the places you have to use your imagination. Movies like the Exorcist, Blair Witch, Session 9 and others leave enough open and hidden to creep you out. Once we learn what led to the scary events, they can be analyzed and understood. I prefer the shrieking terror of the unknown.

On the topic of scary, I was thinking the other day how few songs can tell a scary story. Love is obvs covered, and country and the blues do nicely with tragedy. Pop has the bildungsroman sort of tale down pat. And I guess Frank Black and Esquivel does scifi well. But what about a scary story? The only one I can think of is Nick Cave's Red Right Hand which nicely develops the feeling of growing doom.

Why you got to go and make things so complicated?

I'm not sure if this video makes me want to close my B of A account or put all my money there. All I know I hope this guy got a big raise as he has sold his soul. (thanks, Harris)

Bro, she's got to maintain, cuz an objectivist like her is going insane

I think I have one of the craziest political sites of all time. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand fan, sign 1 of kookiness) is written in such an over the top fashion that I thought it had to be a joke, but then I realized she's real, she means it. Check this example:

I love Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was solid. A straight talking brilliant strategist. He had to take a mid 20th century military, decimated and raped for 8 years by a shortsighted horndog (Clinton), and transform it into a lean, agile state of the art 21st centrury military overnight to go after the post modern 21st enemy. An enemy that has no specific territory, operates in the shadows, kills large numbers of civilians with an incomprehensible barbaric blood lust, and has made Iraq the central front on the war on Islamic fundamentalism. Rumsfeld did it, hands tied by the PC mentality that infected the Bush administration.

There is more madness in here than in Arkham Asylum.

For your consideration

Since I am somewhat mired in my current books I thought I would discuss an author I consider unjustly little known. JG Farrell, an Englishman, wrote a number of novels, but of greatest interest is his British Empire Trilogy. The first, Siege of Krishnapur, is set during the Indian Mutiny (or as the Indians would prefer, the first war of Indian Independence.) The second, Troubles, is set during the slow expulsion of the British from Ireland. The final volume, the Singapore Grip, is set during the 1942 Japanese conquest of Malaya and Singapore.

The protagonists of all the novels are British and each is confronted by a local (or least regional) rejection of Empire. What sets the books apart is Farrell's characterizations. Rather than setting up the British as cruel conquerers, he shows them as arrogant about their assumed role and completely clueless about the realities or desires of the locals. They aren't bad people, in fact they are often very good people. Thanks to their position as members of the Empire they are put in very bad situations, often not of their own choice. Part of the story is that they remain unaware of what their nationality means to others. With the exception of Troubles, which does give some voice to the local Irish, the books are told nearly entirely from the British side. The advantage is that we see them being increasingly disconnected from reality until it hits them like a two by four.

As a further benefit, these are very well written stories. The action in the Siege of Krishnapur is particularly exciting. I thought the little court dramas of the hotel in Troubles were both amusing and troubling. The Singapore Grip suffers for being a bit too lengthy, but the depiction of the bawdy pre-invasion world is quite something. These novels unlike those with a similar theme by Graham Greene or John Le Carre send their message without telegraphing it or rubbing the readers face in it. When the inevitable crop of Iraq novels appear in a few years I hope someone uses Farrell as a reference point.

Randomness

Check out this very early interview with Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill. As the poster notes, its funny to see a Star Wars road show like you might see for any of today's pedestrian efforts.

Speaking of space, if you are an enthusiast, you will be pleased to see that India is looking to get into the manned space program game.

For the Stones fans, have a listen to these outtakes from the Exile sessions.

Here is an interesting map showing the scale of the Iraqi refugee movements. The article upon which it is based is from the most recent Atlantic and is for subscribers only. Don't let that stop you though. See if your employer/local library/alumni association provides free access to Academic Search Premier. If so, you can read the Atlantic and other periodicals for free.

Ha ha!

Here is my favorite reaction to last night's victory results. (only amusing if you are familiar to 80s movies.)

Update: With more nerdy delicious flavor..I give you this.

This and that

Grumpy Old Bookman finds Robert Harris's Imperium boring. I guess if you need a Cicero fix, you can read Anthony Everitt's bio. It's a pity, I rather liked Harris's Pompeii.

The FT's Gideon Rachman poses a question few have dared ask. Does President Bush read too much?

A really bad sign from Iraq.

Bookslut tells of Ian McKellan providing the reading for a new audiobook version of Odyssey.

Best political ads

That are fake. Take a listen to these fake ads on Marketplace.

Forest Fire

Thanks to my Silver Jews radio station on Pandora, I just heard Mark Pickerel and His Praying Hands play Forest Fire. Try the snippet on Amazon. If you are a fan of alt-country, you will like it, I wager.

State of Denial

Bob Woodward's State of Denial is an enjoyable read about a distressing subject. Many of the other major books about the war have focused on problems in Iraq itseld, whether they be applying the wrong military strategy, mismanaging the reconstruction or failing to address the insurgency. This book puts much more focus on the interagency process in Washington, or more appropriately, the lack thereof.

Rumsfeld is the books, in some ways tragic, villain. He is clearly intelligent and perceptive. He is also portrayed as micromanaging and cruel. He appears to be more interested in winning bureaucratic battles than those Iraq. In some sections I was just dumbfounded at how he seemed to block reasonable efforts because they weren't made by "his" people. You also realize that Rumsfeld quest to prove his transformation concept was workable was one of the reasons for the war.

Woodward's books are always gossipy so you get to read what various figures think of each other. David Kay calls Condi Rice the worst national security advisor since the job was created. There are lots of negative labels thrown around in the book.

There are many more subjects covered, including the failures of intelligence (the DIA is made to look rather bad,) the strange hunt for WMD and the role of Prince Bandar (called by the President "my best asshole who knows about the world.) It is all immensely depressing.

Odds and ends

The Economist now has a pair of blogs. One is called Democracy in America, and no it's not a de Tocqueville reading group. The other is bit broader and is called Free Exchange.

For those in Portland, Cinema 21 has Sing Along Mary Poppins this week, complete with silly laugh contest and best costume contest. The Oregonian has details as well as info on the movie and book. Many other cities have or have had the show as well. These photos from Tampa show that people really get into it.

Note: If you get crazy with the digital camera, remember to ERASE, or your kids might send this to postsecret.

Bookworld nicely captures the warring instincts to read what one wants to read and to read what one feels one should read. The book at issue, is the Road, which I had planned on not reading. With all these positive reviews, I wonder if shouldn't get a copy myself.

James Ellroy is not modest. "I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music."

Duck of Minerva discusses using Dr. Strangelove in an international relations class.

Good for Powells.

The real best videos of the 80s

Andrew Sullivan recently asked his readers for the best videos of the 1980s. Somehow these were missed.

Lord of the New Church - Dance with Me. Stiv Bator's idea of flirtation is a bit strange. When he says "The way I want to love you, well, it could be against the law," I don't think he's exaggerating.

Duran Duran - Planet Earth. All by itself, an awesome video and song. However, I was unaware that the Dandy Warhols Last High (also excellent) is an homage to this DD video, from the first shot on to the end.

Sisters of Mercy - This Corrosion. I think technically I prefer Temple of Love, but This Corrosion has a special place in my heart. At the time I failed to understand that this was entirely synth music. I also missed that Eldritch is basically the mystical version of Danzig.

Replacements - Alex Chilton (live.) I'd heard these guys were always too blitzed to play, but they sound pretty good here.

Hoodoo Gurus - What's My Scene. Guilty pleasure.

World Party - Ship of Fools. So great and sadly relevant today.

Adam & the Ants - Prince Charming. The first metrosexual? Apparently he is hoping for a comeback.

Devo - Beautiful World. A little too earnest in its irony, I still like the video for the Boys from Brazil look the lads sport. If you would rather just watch the Ken doll fight the Barbie doll, watch Love without Anger. And actually the chicken imagery in the second video is disturbing.