Last night I picked up Metallica's new album Death Magnetic. Buying Metallica albums had become a somewhat anxious event since Load back in the mid-90s. The good news is that the band was constantly trying something new. They refused to sit on their well deserved laurels and just spit out the same old stuff over and over again. But metal fans are not particularly noted for embracing change and so a backlash started forming against the band. Personally, the changes never bothered me much. What turns me on more than anything in any form of art is creativity. I'm most impressed by those who keep trying to find something new and different. Repeating the same stuff over and over again bores me. So what Metallica was doing wasn't grating on my nerves the way it did many of their fans.
But even I was more than a little rattled by the documentary Some Kind of Monster. It's a brilliant movie. I can't rave enough about it as film making. As a fan of Metallica though, it was traumatizing. Watching lead singer James Hetfield head into rehab and then come out and try to connect again with the band was tough to watch. Worse was the therapist they brought in to help the entire band get along again. It just wasn't metal. The movie documents the making of their last album St. Anger. Again, I liked it better than most. But I go back and forth on how much I like it, largely based on mood. The album is like setting therapy sessions to metal. Sometimes it works for me and other times it annoys the hell out of me.
Around that time I finally managed to see the band live for the first time. Previously they had always rumbled through my area when I was either dead broke or locked into some other event that I couldn't escape from. I went whole hog for the concert, getting a floor pass, which meant no seat and a constant fight for position during the entire concert. Leaving that concert, I knew two things. One, Metallica was still great in concert, no matter how screwed up in the head they had become. And two, I was two old for mosh pits. Next time I'll get an actual seat and save the fighting for younger kids.
Recently I downloaded the singles My Apocalypse and Cyanide from iTunes and quickly fell madly in love with them. As accepting as I was of Metallica's steady change over the years, at that moment I realized just how much I missed the aggressive thrash sound of their early albums. Last night I picked up the rest of the album and remembered clearly why this is my favorite band. This album is the fastest and most aggressive they've made in nearly two decades but it contains the complexity and refinement they developed since then, making this a startlingly satisfying album. The first song, That Was Just Your Life, starts slowly and ominously and then kicks into a higher gear. And as fast as that is, it later finds an even higher gear that has me just about giddy. When I write, I pretty much always put headphones on and blast my ears with metal. After a few songs, the music almost disappears from me. It creates a wall that pushes the outside world away so I can think clearly. It may sound strange to use loud noise to create peace but it works for me. This song however, barges back into my personal space and demands I actually listen to it. About five minutes in it accelerates with Kirk Hammett's solo and becomes impossible to ignore. I'm listening to it right now and it makes it damn near impossible to write. The constantly shifting texture of the song keeps grabbing my attention, charging breakneck forward with an energy that grabs me and takes over.
Reviewing music is not something I do, so this feels really awkward to write. I just don't have the vocabulary for it. But the album makes me so ridiculously happy that there was no alternative but to write about it. The irony is that I named this column/blog for the book Psychotic Reactions that collected the works of the great rock critic Lester Bangs. It's kind of embarassing to do that and find myself unable to write lucidly about rock music. Luckily, being dead, Bangs can't be insulted by that. But he was someone who wrote from a massive passion and love of music, so he would probably understand my writing this particular piece from that same position. Metallica's Death Magnetic is relentlessly aggressive thrash metal and the best thing they have done in a long time. Its long loud songs aren't radio friendly so don't expect to hear these songs there much. But if you dig on serious quality metal, go buy the damn thing now. Don't argue with me. Just do it.
Roger Ebert has a great piece on his blog where he talks about the favorite movies of Presidents and candidates for the job. He suggests that a question for the debates should be "What's your favorite movie?" I think it's a fabulous idea. For one thing, it's the sort of question that never gets asked and would thus have the potential of getting an answer an actual human being might come up with instead of a heavily scripted series of talking points that have been focus grouped to remove any hint of offensive thought or personality.
More importantly, the answer tells you a lot about the person. I personally find it to be a maddening question to answer. It's difficult to narrow down to a list of favorite movies, nevermind just one. And it's likely to change regularly with my mood and whatever might be going on in my life or the world at that moment. Usually I tell people Star Wars , by which I mean Episode IV. The reason I say that is because if I don't see that movie at the impressionable age of six, I'm probably a much different person today. It hit my little brain like a nuclear bomb, igniting my imagination and turning me into someone fairly obsessed with movies. It's probably not a stretch to claim that my mother still regrets taking me to see it. But even that answer is frustrating, because I consider The Empire Strikes Back to be the considerably superior film. And if you push me a little, I'll probably start admitting to my great love for several other movies as well. The kicker is the word favorite. Not best. What do I consider the best movie ever made? I don't even want to talk about that right now, it's too big a topic. Favorite is a bit easier because that makes it a personal choice, not necessarily based on entirely on brilliance.
Ebert does a bit of leg work and returns likely answers for the candidates (and by candidates I mean the ones from the Crips and the Bloods, not any of the lesser known candidates from smaller parties which Ebert doesn't bother to consider). John McCain lists Viva Zapata! along with Letters from Iwo Jima and Some Like It Hot. He even finds an interview in which McCain goes into surprising detail on Viva Zapata! and where it ranks in the works of Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan. That's an answer that says he knows more than a little about movies. Pretty encouraging. Obama lists Casablanca, The Godfather I and II, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Certainly valid choices but they strike me as fairly obvious ones. I don't get any sense of personality from these choices, only the sense that Obama knows what are generally considered great movies.
The VP candidates are more troubling. Neither Biden or Palin are on record with a favorite, even though they have both been presented with the question. This leads me to believe that neither one considers the question important enough to answer. And by extension, neither is one I would want to spend any time with. Of course I had pretty much come to that conclusin previously. This just provides a good reason why. I suppose, to be fair, that you could alternately propose that neither one knew enough about movies to give a real answer. But that just leads back to the previous conclusion, so it's not worth discussing.
An interesting aside is that Bill Clinton called High Noon his favorite movie and George W. Bush called his favorite movie Armageddon. That last one is simply too depressing to think about.
So what's your favorite movie? Or what do you think of the politicians' choices?
They don't make many movies about writers. There is a very good reason for this. Watching someone type is generally pretty boring.
That has a lot to do with why I don't give more updates about my writing projects. I just can't imagine that anyone is actually interested. Most of the work takes place between my ears, making it even less interesting to watch than actual typing. So generally it doesn't occur to me to give an update until some sort of milestone is reached. Can you guess why I'm writing this now?
The last edition of Wannabe talked about finishing the first draft of She Hates the Idea. I put it away for a few weeks while working on polishing a different script. And then with some distance achieved by the break, I went back in and did a second draft. Mostly it was a matter of coming up with a check list of things that were lacking in the first draft. Other things were tightened or dropped and some rearranging was done to accomodate the new stuff. Great. Job done. Time to celebrate.
Or not.
With that milestone reached, it was time for an important and frightening step. Letting someone read it. That someone was my wife. And the result was somewhat less than hoped for. For one thing, it's just not her kind of movie. So I was in the hole with her right from the get go. The killer though was she completely failed to notice a rather important element of the story. And that means I fucked up. I was a little concerned that I was being to subtle about this but I thought that would just lead to confusion. Not seeing it at all was not an idea that crossed my mind. She did say that she thought the script was well written, even if she didn't really care for it. But that one big miss is pretty damn deflating. So it's back to the keyboard to see what I can do to make things clearer and more obvious. I suppose I should take comfort in not tipping my hand and being overly obvious about things. That would be the mature response.
Nope. It's not in me. I'm going to pout about it now.
Okay, so this isn't really all new. But I have upgraded the software for the site and along with that given the old place a fresh coat of paint.
It was long overdue. But the more sophisticated the site has become over the years, the harder each overhaul became. And it hit a point where I just couldn't dredge up the time and/or energy for it. Until now.
Obviously you will notice the slick new look to the place. Those images up top are ones I've taken myself and they randomly change. I'll keep adding to that collection of photos for fun. And since photography is a big hobby of mine these days, you'll notice a Photos addition to the menu. Click on that and you can check out a slideshow of my favorites on Flickr. The forums and gear sections are more tightly integrated now as well. Hopefully this will all encourage me to write more. If it doesn't, take advantage of the new comment system to chew me out for being lazy.
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