The Fate of the World...

I accidentally watched an ad for an NFL documentary a few weeks ago. Only now, weeks later, have I calmed down enough to bitch about it.

I'm really tired of professional sports in general, and mostly because they won't just let me enjoy the sporting event for what it is. Instead, they have to try to make me believe that it matters who wins, and I just refuse to believe that. As a result, I am ridiculed. "You aren't a true fan!" Nope. I'm not. I was never really a "fan" in the usual sense of the world, but now, I'm even less of one.

The documentary: "NFL Turning Point" or some such nonsense, and the subject being the turning point when the New York Jets defense "got their swagger back". Maybe there was more to it, but the sheer gall of the line "got their swagger back" made me cough and splutter and almost pass out and I may have missed the larger message, if there really was one.

You know the style of documentary I mean, I'm sure: the narrator with the grave voice, the portentous music, lots of super slo-mo of guys digging down deep, reaching for the last 1%, putting on their game face, or engaging in any of a thousand other dumb sports cliches. Like any of it mattered. Would the Jets get their swagger back? Would the Commies win the Cold War? Would the 5th Guards Tank Army fail to stop the 2nd SS Panzer Korps at Prochorovka? Would all of Western civilization indeed slide right into the crapper???

For the record: I don't actually give a shit if the New York Jets defense has swagger or not. And I really doubt that it makes any difference if they do or not.

I'm not saying that I reject sports because I think it's frivolous. I like lots of things that are totally frivolous - Star Trek, building model airplanes, Mystery Science Theater 3000, canned pork and beans (okay, canned beans may not be frivolous, but they're often rather unwelcome). What moves me to object is when they want me to believe that something that is fundamentally frivolous really matters. Do I care where LeBron James went? Nope. Do I care if the Jets have swagger or not? Nope. Do I care if there's going to be an NBA season or not? Nope. In fact, I increasingly anti-care about such things. Do I care if there's going to be an NBA season or not? No, and I actually sort of hope not. Do I care if there's an NHL or not? Nope, and frankly it would make my life easier if there weren't any hockey games on TV to ignore.

But not because it's frivolous. Because it's frivolousness pretending to be important. If it was just a game again, I might be inclined to enjoy it.

Sometimes the sports fans tell me it matters because "it's a huge business!" Sure it is. But so was IG Farben. My point is that just the fact that the mere fact that something is a huge business doesn't make it right. And on a more libertarian note, I get a little cheesed every time local sports fans think I should pay higher taxes so they can have a professional team in Phoenix. If it's such a huge business, why do the taxpayers always seem to have to pay for everything? Why don't the people with a vested interest in sports - the "true fans", the owners, the players - pay for a new stadium? The county can't afford to fix the potholes in a public road, but we're all supposed to chivvy up so hitherto-frustrated sports fans can have a team?

I think back to the days before the Cardinals came to Arizona, and then I compare them to the days after they came to Arizona. Nope. My penis is still exactly the same size. Can't say it did anything for my swagger, one way or the other.

So then the sports fans say "Well, if you don't like it, don't watch it!" Fair enough. And they don't have to read this either.

New Album

Insomnium has released a new album called One For Sorrow. Every time I look at it, I think "one for the show, two to get ready, three to produce yet another decent melodic death metal album."

It's good. I don't think it's their best work, but it's good. My personal opinion is that they need to turn the "melodic" dial down a hair, and turn the "metal" dial up a hair. And the guitar sound is less pronounced; it has a more compressed and Marshall-y sound than usual - hence the need to adjust up the metal dial a tad. I happen to like the guitar sound on the album Sterling Black Icon by Fragments of Unbecoming. It may or may not be a good album, but I really like their guitar tone, especially on the song "Dear Floating Water." It's kind of thin and edgy, and I like that. (But apparently I'm a colossal hypocrite, because I also like the guitar sound on the Carcass song "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary", and there isn't anything thin about it. It is, in fact, the sound track of the apocalypse.)

But any new Insomnium is better than no new Insomnium, and the album is still worth a listen.

Every band produces a disappointing album at some point in their career. Some bands produce a great many disappointing albums. Some bands are just flat disappointing period. My benchmark for disappointing albums is the extremely disappointing The Great Burrito Extortion Case by Bowling For Soup.

And hey, here's good news: I didn't hear a single pinched harmonic on the entire album. Pinched harmonics, I contend, are to metal what trucker hats are to headgear, and always make me think of crappy 1980s hair "metal" like Bullet Boys or... oh, I can barely type it... Whitesnake...

Total Invasion

I happen to like the Polish metal band Behemoth. They play "blackened death metal", as cognoscenti call it, and it isn't bad. It's considerably more spare than the melodic death metal I usually listen to, but not quite as thin and abraded as classical Norwegian black metal like Darkthrone. It's just good.

The lyrics are generally indecipherable, and that's good, because I'm sure the lyrical message isn't all that savory. Let's see, an extreme metal band that does a song called Lucifer... Gosh, I wonder what it could possibly be about... You don't have to be The Amazing Kreskin to guess what those lyrics are going to be like.

Some of the singing seems to be in Polish. Some of the singing seems to be in some other language. Latin, maybe, or Aramaic, or who knows what. And some of the singing just amounts to roaring and screeching. It reminds me of a classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where they were mocking a song by Motorhead.

"Oh, must they scream so?"

"Because it's rage, dear."

I could go to www.darklyrics.com and find out what the lyrics really are, but I just don't want to. I enjoy metal music, but I don't give much of a hoot for the metal lifestyle, and all that palaver about left-hand paths strikes me as a bunch of weary adolescent rebellion (you want to experience real metal? Try chemotherapy. That's real metal).

I just like the music, and prefer to make up my own lyrics to the songs. For example, the song Total Invasion, a bonus track on Behemoth's album Evangelion. It's a pretty good song, right down the middle of the blackened death metal turnpike that happens to work for me. And I'm sure that the "total invasion" referenced in the title is something evil and diabolical. But since I can't make out what they're saying, I'm free to think it's a total invasion of bathing beauties bearing trays of iced tea and cucumber sandwiches. Oooh, don't mind if I do!

(Postscript: In the Behemoth song Lucifer, there's a long section where someone is chanting in some language unknown to me. Polish? Latin? Klingon? Well, probably not Klingon, but that gives me an idea for my own blackened death metal band... Anyway, at the end of the chanting in that song, the guy says - and I swear I'm not making this up - "Here comes Bogart." So in my mind, the song is no longer about the Foul Deceiver; it's about Humphrey Bogart. It's much more palatable that way.)

Inartistic License

I haven't written anything in a while. No, let me correct that, I haven't written a blog post in a while. But I've written plenty elsewhere. I'm suffering from an advanced case of the novelist vapors, an odd medical condition where I start to believe that I really could write a book, and most of my writing lately has gone into the treatment of that peculiar medical condition.

As it happens, I can write a book. I've done many times. Publishing a book, on the other hand, has proved to be more difficult. That's a fairly self-serving remark, suggesting that I've been out flogging my latest manuscript to agents and editors and building up a wall-sized collage of rejection slips. But I haven't. The whole process seems so complicated, and so unlikely to succeed, that I just can't be bothered. Yeah, I know all the aphorisms, but spare me - I happen to enjoy writing, but I don't enjoy writing cover letters and going through all that hoohah. All of which means, I suppose, that I shouldn't quit my day job.

But honestly, it isn't as though any of the derivative crap I write is ever going to be featured in the Oprah Book Club, and without that sort of endorsement, commercial success is unlikely. Nor have I sunk to the level of considering e-publishing or a vanity publisher. I'm not sure I want to hand out copies of any of my books and have people call me and say "Gee whiz, what did you write that crap for?" Not that I'm embarrassed about it, but I will admit that it isn't particularly literary.

I notice something in my own personal writing experience that puzzles and amuses me. People read some Famous Horror Author, whose initials may or may not be "Stephen King" or "Dean Koontz" or "Bentley Little". And they say things like "Wow, wasn't that a great villain? He was so AWFUL!" But they read something I wrote, and they get to the villain, and they turn on me. "What did you write THAT for? How could you even THINK that? Are you really THAT sick?" If Stephen King creates some odious character, he is lauded for creating a chilling bad guy. If I do it, people think I've got a screw loose and assume I actually approve of the bad guy. I've never figured out why that double standard exists, but it's very pronounced and predictable. Not everyone does it, but enough have that I've become wary of handing out manuscripts willy-nilly. Nothing takes the fun out of writing faster than trying to convince someone that the fact that your bad guy hates fluffy kittens doesn't mean that YOU hate fluffy kittens too. Or there are exchanges like this: "Look, right here on page 354, the villain gets what's coming to him and justice is served!" "Yeah, but couldn't you have written about big-eyed rabbits in footie pajamas and skipped the bad guy?" "But I was writing a horror novel. Big-eyed rabbits in footie pajamas aren't horrible." "What's wrong with big-eyed rabbits in footie pajamas?" "Nothing! But... But..." And so on.

Everyone else gets to exercise artistic license. Me, I'm held accountable for every damn word I've ever written. It's as though I've been nominated for the Supreme Court. Good thing I haven't been. That zombie apocalypse novel I wrote a while back would come back to haunt me something awful and severely damage my chances of getting the nod from the committee.

"We note in leafing through the corpus of your work that this novel mentioned drug use, drunkenness, sex outside of marriage, death metal, wanton disregard for traffic laws, undercooked pork, and unsafe use of firearms. How do you respond to that?"

"It was a ZOMBIE NOVEL, for crying out loud! And Carpathian Forest is black metal, not death metal!"