Oh, Dem Finns!

Regular readers of my blog (assuming there are any) will recall my taste for a Finnish melodic death metal band called Insomnium. I believe I have now found their cousins in the form of a Finnish melodic doom/death metal band called Swallow the Sun. There are passing similiaries between them - emphasis on mood rather than raw technique, and an overall sensibility that "tr00 fans" (as they apparently call themselves) would likely describe as "sellout". But they're both good.

Insomnium is in general faster, more aggressive, and closer to melodic death. Swallow the Sun is slower, much closer to doom and in some cases verging upon funeral doom. But they both are moody, melodic and atmospheric, and I like them both a lot.

One thing that Swallow the Sun's vocalist does that I find particularly chilling is switching from a very deep death gurgle to a high-pitched black metal shriek apparently at whim, as showcased in Horror, Pt 1. (And that crash ending in Horror, Pt 1? Jeez. Unsettling!) And then a few songs later he sings clean and well, and then drops into a death gurgle and winds it up into a black metal shriek without taking a breath. He's versatile, if nothing else. (Just my luck, it'll turn out the clean vocalist is a session guy they hired just to make me look foolish.)

Lords of Chaos

I recently read a book called "Lords of Chaos", about the bloody rise of Satanic black metal music. Much of the book is pretty interesting, charting as it does the evolution of black metal from thrash, and the subsequent evolution of Norwegian black metal and its violent subculture (usually referred to as a "scene"). It's incomplete, especially its rather cursory treatment of thrash and death metal and its complete lack of any explanation of what black metal really sounds like, but it's still interesting enough.

The book gets much less interesting when its authors start the usual mass media accusations that all black metal fans are criminals waiting for a crime scene, that all black metal is Nazi, and that there's a great occult satanic black metal conspiracy out there. Black metal has to be "taken seriously", they intone gravely, lest something bad happen. I'm no Pollyanna and I know that bad things have happened in the black metal scene, especially in Norway and Germany, and that bad things are probably going to happen in Poland and Russia in the near future. But come on, do they seriously think that the fact that I listen to Enslaved, Darkthrone and Emperor means that I'm going to commit some beastly act of antisocial protest? Do I have to go on some watch list because I own - gasp - a Burzum album??* And - double gasp - I actually like it???**

The authors strongly imply that black metal makes people do bad things. I think they miss the point, which is that some people do bad things, and some of them happen to listen to black metal. Are some lackwits chivvied into doing bad things because they they think Varg wants them to? Probably. But they'd probably do bad things anyway, even without Varg; they'd just listen to a different Peid Piper. (Varg Vikernes is such a convenient figure for the mass media to focus on that, as they say, if he didn't exist, they'd have to invent him.) They seem to argue that there's no way to just listen to black metal without actually sinking into the black metal lifestyle as it existed in the early 1990s, in much the same way that critics of rap argue that you can't listen to rap without turning into a grill-sporting misogynist with a Hummer and an AK-47. Are there misogynist gun-toting thugs in rap? Sure, but there would have been misogynistic gun-toting thugs even without rap; we'd just be blaming someone else (Perry Como, maybe).

Still, I liked the book, even though I found its later sociological chapters somewhat unconvincing, and its heavy focus on Varg Vikernes, NSBM, and Satanism somewhat limiting, and its alarmist tone kind of heavy-handed. Parts of it reminded me of Civics classes in the early 1970s, when we had to be taught alarmist nonsense about the Communist world takeover timetable. Now it's the black metal Satanist world takeover timetable. At least the Communists had a whole country to work with. Most black metal groups seem to have trouble scraping up a rehearsal space. It's hard to take a conspiracy seriously when it has to crash in its friend's basement because it can't scrape up rent money.

(NSBM stands for National Socialist Black Metal, which is kind of a contradiction in terms. Most black metal seems to stress the power and primacy of the individual, while National Socialism teaches the subjugation of the individual to the state. NSBM does exist, but it's not as common as they would have us believe. Most of the true racist material I've heard over the years sounds more like hardcore or Oi! than black metal to me anyway.)

*The album I refer to is Filosofem, Burzum's last pre-incarceration album. It's something of a classic in the black metal field, up there with In the Nightside Eclipse and Transilvanian Hunger, but let's be honest about something - it's sung in German, which I am not fluent in, and even if I was fluent in German, I couldn't understand the vocals anyway. And I have no intention of ever looking up the lyrics, because I just don't care about the lyrics. But as a musical effort, it is quite singular; the first two tracks are almost hypnotic, and even though it's black metal it's curiously soporific and calming.

**Let there be no misunderstanding here. I do not and never did approve of the church burnings that Burzum advocated, Varg Kikernes was convicted of, and some black metal mouthpieces approve of. Nor do I personally admire Varg Vikernes, or agree with his political, racial and philosophical positions. The snippets of Vargsmal that I've read come off sounding like warmed-over Nietzsche filtered through Josef Goebbels, and that's a tough act to hang with. But as an album, musically, it's amazing.

Yuppie Bastards

Tonight I watched an episode of the new "Planet Earth" series in Discover. Pretty nice, it was, full of good camera work and novel things, and I happen to like Sigourney Weaver's voice. But man was it ever hard to finish. It seemed that every five minutes the show cut to commercials, and one set of commercials in particular made me scream with frustration - the new Volvo commercials touting the safety features of their cars. I'm sure the engineers at Volvo designed them in good faith, but the commercials make it obvious that the supremely unconcerned yuppie bastards in the car are clearly relying on technology to take the place of judgment.

Fer instance: here's the self-important yuppie couple driving home from some insufferably self-important yuppie soiree (I like to think it's a Dave Matthews Band concert or a "poetry slam" at the local coffee house). It's dark, and it's foggy, and they're going too damn fast, and they're constantly looking at each other as they flap their gums and emit wan self-important drivel. It's only when the collision-avoidance system starts to flash that Yuppie Bastard At The Wheel looks up to see the newspaper delivery truck, and what's his move? Hit the brakes? Oh, come on, I'm driving a damn Volvo, I'm too self-important to hit the brakes! I just duck into the next lane. The moral of the story is that you don't have to slow down in fog, exercise good judgment behind the wheel, or for that matter even look at the road, because your collision avoidance system will do the work. Meantime, you can exchange tepid and superficial po-mo claptrap with your date without having to look up.

Fer instance: here's another yuppie cruising down the freeway in light traffic, and suddenly he's held up by another car. He gives his rear view mirror the most cursory of examinations, too regal in his august yuppiedom to actually turn his head and look, and he almost runs a motorcycle off the road until his "blind spot detector" tells him to stay in his own lane already. Heaven forbid the self-satisfied moron should actually expend any energy at all by turning his head and looking. The moral of this story is that there's no need to check your blind spots and maintain situational awareness; you can forget the world around you and cruise in blithe, unconcerned self-satisfaction knowing that technology will keep you from squashing someone. Besides, Louis XIV never had to check his blind spots; why should you?

Fer instance: a woman walks toward her car in the dark parking lot and the remote can now tell her if it detects a heartbeat in the car. She backs up and walks away quickly, presumably to call Ghostbusters to get the class-5 full-roaming vapor out of her car (a real nasty one too). Does this actually happen? Is it common practice for thugs to lurk in the backs of cars? It's never happened to me, but then again, I'm 6'4" and nobody would ever want to rape me, so maybe I'm not the right person to judge the relative lunacy of this "safety feature", but it certainly sounds to me like it's pandering to paranoia and urban myth, not actual need. But if it helps someone avoid being attacked, I'm all for that, and unlike the aforementioned "safety features" it doesn't actually encourage bad driving habits. It's just such an overt Oxygen/WE touch it seems crass and exploitative to me.

If Volvo is really serious about improving the safety of the highways, here's a short list of technological features they should put in their cars.

1. A system that every 20 seconds would bellow SLOW DOWN, PAY ATTENTION, SHUT UP, AND STOP TAILGATING!

2. A robot arm that would grab any cell phone in sight and chuck it out the window. It's drivin' time, you clod, so lose the phone.

According to The Amazing Rondo:

"The reason I don't listen to the Dave Matthews Band is because they don't knife each other."

- The Amazing Rondo

Words I Don't Want To Hear

I was in the bathroom at work a few days ago, standing before the porcelain dingus, attending to my business, when a guy two urinals down suddenly looked at me and said "I just noticed something odd."

There are many things wrong with this, the first being that when I'm in the bathroom, I don't want to have a conversation about anything. Maybe exchanging a word or two over the sink or while trying to convince the fancy high-tech paper towel dispensers to actually dispense a scrap of paper towel, but no more than that. There is nothing - nothing - that can be so important that I can't be allowed to attend to my business first. I mean that seriously. The building is falling down? My shoes are on fire? A rabid leopard is in one of the stalls? Scientists have located an asteroid aimed directly at me? Okay, I'll deal with it when I'm done, but not until I'm done.

And then there's the chill horror of realizing that someone in a state of partial disrobement suddenly noticed something odd. Any "urinal conversation" is bad, but one that creates such a landscape of horrible visuals is worse. But not the worst.

The worst is the inter-stall conversation, something so appalling I can't bring myself to write about it.

This highlights a problem that I encounter fairly often - the inability of people around me to keep their mouths shut for more than a few seconds at a time. I'm not talking about friends. I figure they have the right. I'm talking about guys I don't know from Adam who can't spend 45 seconds in a bathroom without having to yammer about something irrelevant. I choose to view it as a kind of narcissism - the belief that their thoughts are of such value and relevance they can't even let me tinkle in peace without having to tell me about their political convictions, theories on UFOs, or mindless prattle about how the Seahawks need more left-handed offensive guards. I mean, for heaven's sake, if you're going to prattle about irrelevant things, start a blog that nobody reads and prattle away without bothering anyone. But leave me alone in the bathroom, okay?

Oh, and the odd thing he noticed? It was in reference to a group email that had been sent out the day before. One would think it could have waited.

On The Other Hand...

One might well think that I do nothing but complain about the state of the model hobby these days. And just to prove that I don't always whine, I'd now like to talk about some of the things that I like.

I like, for example, the tidal wave of new 1/72nd scale armor kits coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe. I've always liked 1/72nd scale armor - the kits are generally fairly inexpensive, easy to build, easy to paint, and easy to display. For years there was a decided lack of variety in this scale, but the Eastern Europeans are pouring on the kits and it seems that the "main line" companies like Revell-Germany and Esci are joining the cavalcade.

I like Academy kits. Good fit, good detail, good decals, an increasingly good mix of subjects, and all at a reasonable price.

I like the 1/72nd scale Revell Gato, even though I'll never build it. I don't look forward to wrestling with a five-foot submarine, and there's literally nowhere I could possibly display it, but I like knowing I have that option (I have the 1/72nd scale Type-VII U-boat in the early stages of construction, and it's just about as big as I ever care to go with a model.)

I like the wide and ever-widening range of decals that are available.

I like most model magazines, especially FSM and SAMI. The latter has a wonderfully dry sense of humor, and I find it quite interesting that it routinely features models that were brush-painted and nobody gets all bent out of shape over it.

I like the way Model Master II paints airbrush.

So there.

Oh Boy, Another Tiger

Modeling, like any other human activity, is subject to fad and fashion. Remember the 1960s when spacecraft models were hot? They were fashionable then, but today, admitting that you build spacecraft models is a bit like admitting that you still wear platform shoes and polyester slacks.

"Oh," they say. "You're one of those niche modelers."

Every year Fine Scale Modeler has a "five most-wanted kits" contest, where the consuming public has a chance to suggest to the various manufacturers what new models should be made. I almost dread these things. What manner of obscure German tank is going to make the top of the list this year? I ask. Oh boy, a steel-wheeled late-production Tiger E, as though there aren't enough damn Tiger models already.

Every year I dutifully draw up my list, knowing full well that it's entirely futile. How many other votes for a 1/48th scale Spirit rover or Lunar Rover, or a good accurate Apollo CSM/LM, do I think they'll get? As an example of how unpopular spacecraft modeling is, there's only one category for spacecraft, and it is usually dominated by science fiction subjects, while I think there are three armor categories, one for each of the major scales (and all of them, most likely, dominated by increasingly obscure subtypes of German vehicles).

A while ago I went to my local hobby shop. Actually, it's been quite a while ago, but never mind. The DML 1/35th scale Maus super-heavy tank model had just come out, and the "Panzer Lobby" had accumulated at the counter to ogle the contents of said kit. I couldn't help but listen in as they tried to impress one another with their encyclopedic command of Maus lore - its cushy ride, its 5.1 surround-sound stereo system, its ice-water dispenser, its ability to wipe out entire armies of those stupid smelly Russians with a single blow.

But they kept pronouncing its name Maws, and clearly believed that it had something to do with the Maws of Death. Entirely lost on them was the fact that Maus is pronounced mouse, and indeed means mouse, and was an ironic name German tankers foisted on the vehicle because of its immense size and clumsiness. Also lost on them was the fact that only a handful of them were built (five, as I recall) and there isn't any evidence that they were ever used in combat.

So there is is. We get a brand-new kit of a tank that wasn't mass-produced and never saw action, but we don't get a kit of a spacecraft that carried men to the Moon, or which is currently exploring Mars.

Well, time for me to go put on my platform shoes and polyester slacks, I guess.

Fine Scale Collector

I've subscribed to a model magazine called Fine Scale Modeler for over a decade. Maybe over two decades. So long that I don't remember how long. In the last year I've noticed a development in the hobby (only the pretentious would call it an "industry") that finally reached its final form on the back cover of the latest FSM.

For a while now so-called "die cast replicas" have been proliferating. They're sort of like models, only you don't actually build them; you just buy them and put them on a shelf (or store them in dry nitrogen if you think that they, like early Star Wars toys, will appreciate in value). Die-cast replicas used to be limited to cars, farm machinery and things like that, but in the last year there has been a literal explosion in die-cast replicas of tanks, aircraft, and even figures.

Fair enough. Some people like collecting things like that, and I have no problem with that. I personally derive no satisfaction from buying a die-cast replica of anything, and on those rare occasions when I do buy "pre-finished models" I tend to take them apart, repaint them, and reassemble them. But I recognize that for some people, collecting might be more fun than actually building.

Anyway, on the back cover of the latest FSM were a bunch of pictures of various pre-finished models. German soldiers, a KFOR Challenger and whatnot. And the text read "Do these things belong in Fine Scale Modeler? ABSOLUTELY!"

To which I reply, ABSOLUTELY THE HELL NOT!

If you want to collect pre-finished models, do so in good health. If you want to read a magazine about collecting pre-finished models, do so in good health. But at least thus far, the M in FSM stands for Modeler, and I see nothing in collecting pre-finished models (or die-cast replicas) that is in any way related to modeling.

What would a Workbench Review of a pre-finished model read like?

I took the F-86 out of the package. I put it on the shelf. It didn't seem centered so I moved it a little to one side. I turned it slightly. My wife asked me to get it out of the living room so I put it back in the package.

If they change the name of the magazine to Fine Scale Collector, then I'd say such things belong in the magazine. But until they do, I'd prefer that such things not appear in the magazine.

I used to think that the Detail Fetish was the most worrying thing in scale modeling. Put simply, the Detail Fetish argues that the quality of a model, or the enjoyment you derive from building it, is directly proportional to how many aftermarket detail sets you bought for it. Hardly a single model appears in FSM's Reader's Gallery without a listing of the aftermaket stuff that went into it - cockpit detail sets, turned aluminum gun barrels, working metal tracks, whatever.

I don't generally buy aftermarket detail sets. I do occasionally buy conversion parts, and I'm a notorious collector of decal sets, but I rarely buy detail sets. It's not that I'm a tightwad, or that I can't afford them. Nor is it that I'm a purist and think that every improvement should be stratchbuilt. (Or maybe I am! I'm not a great scratchbuilder, but there's very little that I won't attempt with sheet styrene, stretched sprue, bits of wire and a punch-and-die set.) I just derive no satisfaction from sticking detail sets in a model, even though my modeling compadres automatically deduct a full point from my modeling GPA because I don't have aftermarket flattened tires on my Lancaster or didn't put photoetched exhaust shrouds on my Tiger (not that I build many Tigers, but that's a subject for a different day).

This used to bug me, and in a way it still does. Since when is the quality of a model, or the pleasure in building it, related strictly to the quantity of detail sets one put into the model? If you like detail sets, for heaven's sake, buy a lot of them and have fun with them. But don't automatically dismiss any model that doesn't have a Cutting Edge cockpit simply because it doesn't have a Cutting Edge cockpit.

But looking back on it, I see the guys who subscribe to the Detail Fetish as being fellow modelers, albeit a type of modeler that I don't really understand and who don't really understand me. But at least they're modelers.

I don't see collectors of pre-finished models as modelers at all. And I think they're slowly taking over "my" magazine.