Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Collected Thoughts 01-07-09

  • I'm going to strongly encourage you to attend the Hell Ya! night at Spaceland on Sunday, January 17th.
  • We Listen For You's Top 10 Films of the 2000's. I dunno if I have the emotional witheral to tackle that topic, but my list would likely also include Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (funniest film of the decade, for my money), The Royal Tennenbaums, Oldboy, and probably Almost Famous.
  • FMLY has a rad group bike riding / indie rock show thing going on. Looks fun.
  • A month or two ago I started getting creepy stalker emails inviting me to a Craigslist ad that seemed to be soliciting sex. This was rather annoying... until I found out it was viral marketing for Eric Layer's new project. (NSFW)
  • Tell me if I'm off my rocker here. I noticed that the finger moves required for bass playing more resemble female masturbation while guitar playing can often be jerkier, more closely resembling male masturbation. Is this why there are so many female bass players? (And why so many of them are so... erm, appealing?)
  • Spider-Man 4 is in trouble. It sounds like the studio isn't giving Raimi as much freedoms as Raimi felt was agreed upon. I can't decide if this is good or bad. I think The Vulture is a really boring villain, even if played by John Malkovich.
  • YES. Muse absolutely should score the new Clash of the Titans. This would be like Queen scoring Flash Gordon. ALL GOOD AND DECENT PEOPLE SHOULD HOPE FOR THIS TO HAPPEN.
  • Yesterday, after two years of looking in book stores, I finally found a collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories. Smith is the third member of the holy trinity of writers that made Weird Tales a historic publication. (Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft being the other two, of course.)

    Smith is widely considered by weird horror, sci-fi, and fantasy fans to indispensible yet mainstream bookstores seldom carry him on their shelves. (Plenty of shitty expanded universe Star Wars books, though!) I don't do the used book stores because old publications of these stories can be edited into oblivion; newer collections are almost always more faithful to the original works, having the benefit of now knowing how vital these writers were.

    Anyways, I'm three stories in and I'm fairly unimpressed.
  • The Vanity Fair article on Tiger Woods was interesting. I hope I don't offend anyone... but what really struck me as odd by everything was how gross Tiger's liaisons are. They look like Ball State girls who never stopped being Ball State girls. I fully expect famous, rich, talented, intelligent athletes like Tiger Woods to be scraping ugglies with women like Adriana Lima and the rest of Brazil. Instead, he chased after a bunch of boring, trashy, blond coctail waitresses?! Come on, man! You are wasting your life. You owe it to the rest of us plebes to live like a Roman god.

    But no, the entire point of the cheating, surely what gave Tiger a five-wood, was the act of leaving his celebrity and slumming around in the gutters with the guys who can't even afford to play golf. The trashyness is what he likes. Ugh. What a waste of power.
  • How the internet changed writing. I don't have much tolerance for nostalgic technology detractors. They always miss the forest for the trees, they've done it since man made fire. Every advancement brings its own unique flaws into our way of life, but those flaws are the impetus for further advancement.
  • I'm gonna let this one surprise you:

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That Walrus is hung! But really what a gross video.

Satisfied '75 said...

some great links. thanks

Wa said...

"newer collections are almost always more faithful to the original works, having the benefit of now knowing how vital these writers were"

I find fault with this statement. Esp. since the collection you chose doesn't seem to be wowing you. "Tales of Zothique" or "A rendezvous in Averoigne" I can personally vouch for as excellent.

Mouse said...

I'm not talking about the selection of stories, I'm talking about the editing. You couldn't get an authentic republication of Howard's Conan stories until 2000, for example.