Ramble Ramble
Jun. 7th, 2002 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2My big accomplishments for the week, I suppose, are mixing 2 cds to listen to in the car. That and playing a lot of Dungeon Siege, buying a few books, cooking some... mostly I went to work, worked, came back home, and goofed off.
I bought a used game last Sunday -- Oni. It's sort of a shooter, sort of a karate fight game, and sort of like Tomb Raider or American McGee's Alice or games of that sort where you have to jump through hoops and duck or slide under things, which in my opinion adds nothing to my enjoyment of the game. And like those other games, I soon reached a point where I kept dying after jumping through a lot of hoops, and I'd get sent back to the begining, and so I stopped playing and went back to Dungeon Siege. At least in DS, I don't have to continually start over at a previous save position... I'm always making progress towards the end of the game.
Games like Oni and Alice just aren't for me, I guess.
Having read two of Ann Perry's "Charlotte and Thomas Pitt" Victorian mysteries, I decided to pick up a couple more. I had 2 others still to read, but they were much later in the series, and I thought if I stopped by Half Price books on the way to work I could grab whatever else they had and maybe read more of the earlier books first.
They DID have a few more books in the series. In fact, I quickly had 7 books in my hands and I don't think I was finished looking. Well, as much as I like the series, I hadn't planned to buy that many books, and it's not like I'm going to read them all in the next month, so I put a few of them back, and managed to escape with only four more. That's six books to read, so that should keep me busy, especially since I'm reading other things at the same time (like Samurai Cat!).
I was listening to my Boomtown Rats cd last week for some reason. I think I'd decided to make a cd of really depressing music, or something. I'm constantly writing down ideas for making different themed cds, and then seeing if I can come up with enough songs that I like to actually fill the cd out. Anyway, I only own this one cd by the Boomtown Rats, "The Fine Art of Surfacing", which I inherited from my old roommate Darrell, who was a big fan of theirs. I don't think I would even know much about the group if not for him... but this cd does contain the one song of theirs that still gets regular airplay, "I Don't Like Mondays". Darrell had told me many times that it was based on a real incident about a girl who shot a bunch of kids at a school, and that the song had been banned/pulled from a lot of stations once people realized what it was about. So I was thinking that I should use the internet to see if that was true.
On Sunday, having forgotten that I wanted to look this up, I was surfing the internet and wound up reading several stories at the Crime Library and also some at Internet Crime Archives (which is a disturbing place to visit because of the sounds of gunfire and a tolling bell on the main page). I was mostly interested to see if there was any new information on Gary Ridgeway/The Green River Killer, or on William Pickton, the guy that owned that pig farm in Vancouver and may have killed up to 54 women. But I also read a detailed account of the JonBenet Ramsey case, which... it's kind of disturbing in that the police never even considered that someone besides the parents might have committed the murder, and therefore their whole investigation went awry, because they were trying to fit clues to their preconcieved theory and put pressure on the parents to confess, rather than performing a normal investigation where you examine all the clues and eliminate possible suspects.
I guess I like to read morbid stuff at times. In any case, somewhere in there I found a list of all the high school shooting/mass murder incidents in America, and it turns out the first one was Brenda Spencer, age 17, who in January 1979 shot at a school across from her home in San Diego, killing 2 men and injuring 8 children and a police officer. When she was apprehended, she said she did it because "I don't like Mondays", and added that she wanted to liven things up a little.
So that's where the Boomtown Rats song came from.
Another thing I read a little on this week was the death of Layne Staley, former lead singer of Alice In Chains and Mad Season. He died of a drug overdose -- heroin and cocaine, aka a "speedball". What's really sad about it is that he died in his own home in the U District, but his body wasn't discovered for 2 weeks. To me that suggests that he was a lonely drug addict with few close friends. Anyway, no big surprise, Dee Dee Ramone died just this week, also likely from a drug overdose. Rock stars and drug deaths go hand in hand.
I always liked Alice In Chains. Their cd "Dirt" is one of the best cds by any Seattle band, and at the time it came out they seemed likely to emerge as the best of all the Northwest bands, better than Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, even Nirvana. But internal conflict/band politics and Layne's drug problems kept them from ever really reaching their potential.
It's interesting that nearly every song on Dirt is about struggling with drug addiction and knowing that it's going to kill you if you can't stop -- and you can't stop. It's easy to tie all of those songs to Layne Staley, since he sang them, and read into it the story of his life and death -- but actually more than half the songs were written by Jerry Cantrell. After all, it's not likely that Layne was the only one in the band to ever do drugs. I do wonder how much Jerry was writing about himself, and how much he was writing about his bandmate?
So on Sunday one of the things I did was create a cd of music from Northwest Bands. I picked one song per band, and was able to fill out a cd pretty easily. I tried to avoid the obvious choices -- nothing from Nevermind, SuperUnknown, or Ten. I picked songs that I like, so I really liked the results. I need to make a second cd like this I think, but I'm not sure if I have enough material to do it. I mean, there are many more songs by Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Nirvana, etc that I like, but some of the more obscure bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Blind Tribe, etc, I only really had one song that I really liked of theirs.
On the flip side, I completely avoided a few bands like Hole and Foo Fighters since their status as Northwest bands is somewhat questionable. I could include them both on another cd. And I've always wanted an excuse to pick up a cd by Sleater-Kinney, to see what they're like... I've read many good reviews of them, but never listened to them.
Later in the week, I decided to make a cd of "Grunge Pretenders", ie all of the bands from outside the Northwest who jumped on the grunge bandwagon while they had the chance. You'd think that there are waaay too many bands that fit this mold, but actually I had to use 2 songs per band and in some cases 3 or 4 songs from a given band, just to fill out the cd. My cd includes: Silverchair (2 songs), Seven Mary Three (2), Bush (3), Stone Temple Pilots (4), Creed (2), Filter, Days Of The New, Godsmack, Wish For Eden... I forget what else.
It's kind of sad that I own all of these bands, although in several cases I picked up the cds used, often for just a buck. Anyway, I generally like most of the songs I used, but once I had them all on one cd, I didn't really want to listen to it. The only band in that group that I really like a lot is Stone Temple Pilots. It was almost as if, having assembled all of these songs on a cd, I'd completed my task... listening to it afterwards was completely unneccessary.
I really feel like STP doesn't belong on a list with those other bands... Stone Temple Pilots started out as an imitation grunge band, but they have waaaay more talent than Silverchair, Bush, Seven Mary Three, Creed... actually STP has emerged as one of the best hard rock bands of the last 10 years. I was thinking about that, that between my Seattle music cd and my fake grunge cd, only 2 bands are really still around and still more or less relevant -- Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam. Either one has the chance to become one of those rare bands that just go on forever, like the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, U2. Assuming Scott Wieland doesn't die of a drug overdose of course.
And I want to rant about Godsmack especially. Let's be honest, Scott Wieland of STP isn't a great lyricist, but he's much better than the guys in Bush or Silverchair or Seven Mary Three, who had very little at all to say. But those guys look like Russian literary giants compared to Godsmack. This is a band that is musically talented, probably moreso than most of the other bands on my "fake grunge" cd, but they've borrowed most of their music ideas from Alice In Chains, and lyrically they can't write their way out of a paper bag. I can't imagine that they'll have much staying power, if they can't learn to write halfway decently. I mean, it doesn't take much to write lyrics for a metal band... but there are reasons why bands like Metallica and Megadeth (and Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains) rise to the top. Their songs actually have something to say, and when they don't, they at least contain interesting words and phrases.
I typed "Godsmack sucks" into a search engine, just to see how many people agreed with me... and I wound up on some metal site where people's entire lives are wrapped up in proving that their favorite band rules and any other band/genre sucks, is gay, etc. etc. ad nauseum. I'm always struck by the mind-numbing stupidity of most rock fans, particulary metal fans. What strikes me most is that, in almost every case, I would think the metal fan has a much narrower view of what music is worth listening to than the musicians they idolize. I'm pretty sure that most musicians, even in metal, are open to a wide range of musical styles.
Well anyway, enough rambling for now. ^_^ Oh, I'll end with a joke, a true story from one of my co-workers. Her step father died a little over a week ago, and she attended the funeral with her family and her mother. As they drove back home, her mother was talking about her deceased husband, and said, "We were planning to go get a truckload of wood yesterday." And my co-worker, thinking of her step-father's weak heart (and otherwise not thinking at all), replied, "Well it's a good thing you didn't -- that could have killed him!"
I bought a used game last Sunday -- Oni. It's sort of a shooter, sort of a karate fight game, and sort of like Tomb Raider or American McGee's Alice or games of that sort where you have to jump through hoops and duck or slide under things, which in my opinion adds nothing to my enjoyment of the game. And like those other games, I soon reached a point where I kept dying after jumping through a lot of hoops, and I'd get sent back to the begining, and so I stopped playing and went back to Dungeon Siege. At least in DS, I don't have to continually start over at a previous save position... I'm always making progress towards the end of the game.
Games like Oni and Alice just aren't for me, I guess.
Having read two of Ann Perry's "Charlotte and Thomas Pitt" Victorian mysteries, I decided to pick up a couple more. I had 2 others still to read, but they were much later in the series, and I thought if I stopped by Half Price books on the way to work I could grab whatever else they had and maybe read more of the earlier books first.
They DID have a few more books in the series. In fact, I quickly had 7 books in my hands and I don't think I was finished looking. Well, as much as I like the series, I hadn't planned to buy that many books, and it's not like I'm going to read them all in the next month, so I put a few of them back, and managed to escape with only four more. That's six books to read, so that should keep me busy, especially since I'm reading other things at the same time (like Samurai Cat!).
I was listening to my Boomtown Rats cd last week for some reason. I think I'd decided to make a cd of really depressing music, or something. I'm constantly writing down ideas for making different themed cds, and then seeing if I can come up with enough songs that I like to actually fill the cd out. Anyway, I only own this one cd by the Boomtown Rats, "The Fine Art of Surfacing", which I inherited from my old roommate Darrell, who was a big fan of theirs. I don't think I would even know much about the group if not for him... but this cd does contain the one song of theirs that still gets regular airplay, "I Don't Like Mondays". Darrell had told me many times that it was based on a real incident about a girl who shot a bunch of kids at a school, and that the song had been banned/pulled from a lot of stations once people realized what it was about. So I was thinking that I should use the internet to see if that was true.
On Sunday, having forgotten that I wanted to look this up, I was surfing the internet and wound up reading several stories at the Crime Library and also some at Internet Crime Archives (which is a disturbing place to visit because of the sounds of gunfire and a tolling bell on the main page). I was mostly interested to see if there was any new information on Gary Ridgeway/The Green River Killer, or on William Pickton, the guy that owned that pig farm in Vancouver and may have killed up to 54 women. But I also read a detailed account of the JonBenet Ramsey case, which... it's kind of disturbing in that the police never even considered that someone besides the parents might have committed the murder, and therefore their whole investigation went awry, because they were trying to fit clues to their preconcieved theory and put pressure on the parents to confess, rather than performing a normal investigation where you examine all the clues and eliminate possible suspects.
I guess I like to read morbid stuff at times. In any case, somewhere in there I found a list of all the high school shooting/mass murder incidents in America, and it turns out the first one was Brenda Spencer, age 17, who in January 1979 shot at a school across from her home in San Diego, killing 2 men and injuring 8 children and a police officer. When she was apprehended, she said she did it because "I don't like Mondays", and added that she wanted to liven things up a little.
So that's where the Boomtown Rats song came from.
Another thing I read a little on this week was the death of Layne Staley, former lead singer of Alice In Chains and Mad Season. He died of a drug overdose -- heroin and cocaine, aka a "speedball". What's really sad about it is that he died in his own home in the U District, but his body wasn't discovered for 2 weeks. To me that suggests that he was a lonely drug addict with few close friends. Anyway, no big surprise, Dee Dee Ramone died just this week, also likely from a drug overdose. Rock stars and drug deaths go hand in hand.
I always liked Alice In Chains. Their cd "Dirt" is one of the best cds by any Seattle band, and at the time it came out they seemed likely to emerge as the best of all the Northwest bands, better than Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, even Nirvana. But internal conflict/band politics and Layne's drug problems kept them from ever really reaching their potential.
It's interesting that nearly every song on Dirt is about struggling with drug addiction and knowing that it's going to kill you if you can't stop -- and you can't stop. It's easy to tie all of those songs to Layne Staley, since he sang them, and read into it the story of his life and death -- but actually more than half the songs were written by Jerry Cantrell. After all, it's not likely that Layne was the only one in the band to ever do drugs. I do wonder how much Jerry was writing about himself, and how much he was writing about his bandmate?
So on Sunday one of the things I did was create a cd of music from Northwest Bands. I picked one song per band, and was able to fill out a cd pretty easily. I tried to avoid the obvious choices -- nothing from Nevermind, SuperUnknown, or Ten. I picked songs that I like, so I really liked the results. I need to make a second cd like this I think, but I'm not sure if I have enough material to do it. I mean, there are many more songs by Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Nirvana, etc that I like, but some of the more obscure bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Blind Tribe, etc, I only really had one song that I really liked of theirs.
On the flip side, I completely avoided a few bands like Hole and Foo Fighters since their status as Northwest bands is somewhat questionable. I could include them both on another cd. And I've always wanted an excuse to pick up a cd by Sleater-Kinney, to see what they're like... I've read many good reviews of them, but never listened to them.
Later in the week, I decided to make a cd of "Grunge Pretenders", ie all of the bands from outside the Northwest who jumped on the grunge bandwagon while they had the chance. You'd think that there are waaay too many bands that fit this mold, but actually I had to use 2 songs per band and in some cases 3 or 4 songs from a given band, just to fill out the cd. My cd includes: Silverchair (2 songs), Seven Mary Three (2), Bush (3), Stone Temple Pilots (4), Creed (2), Filter, Days Of The New, Godsmack, Wish For Eden... I forget what else.
It's kind of sad that I own all of these bands, although in several cases I picked up the cds used, often for just a buck. Anyway, I generally like most of the songs I used, but once I had them all on one cd, I didn't really want to listen to it. The only band in that group that I really like a lot is Stone Temple Pilots. It was almost as if, having assembled all of these songs on a cd, I'd completed my task... listening to it afterwards was completely unneccessary.
I really feel like STP doesn't belong on a list with those other bands... Stone Temple Pilots started out as an imitation grunge band, but they have waaaay more talent than Silverchair, Bush, Seven Mary Three, Creed... actually STP has emerged as one of the best hard rock bands of the last 10 years. I was thinking about that, that between my Seattle music cd and my fake grunge cd, only 2 bands are really still around and still more or less relevant -- Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam. Either one has the chance to become one of those rare bands that just go on forever, like the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, U2. Assuming Scott Wieland doesn't die of a drug overdose of course.
And I want to rant about Godsmack especially. Let's be honest, Scott Wieland of STP isn't a great lyricist, but he's much better than the guys in Bush or Silverchair or Seven Mary Three, who had very little at all to say. But those guys look like Russian literary giants compared to Godsmack. This is a band that is musically talented, probably moreso than most of the other bands on my "fake grunge" cd, but they've borrowed most of their music ideas from Alice In Chains, and lyrically they can't write their way out of a paper bag. I can't imagine that they'll have much staying power, if they can't learn to write halfway decently. I mean, it doesn't take much to write lyrics for a metal band... but there are reasons why bands like Metallica and Megadeth (and Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains) rise to the top. Their songs actually have something to say, and when they don't, they at least contain interesting words and phrases.
I typed "Godsmack sucks" into a search engine, just to see how many people agreed with me... and I wound up on some metal site where people's entire lives are wrapped up in proving that their favorite band rules and any other band/genre sucks, is gay, etc. etc. ad nauseum. I'm always struck by the mind-numbing stupidity of most rock fans, particulary metal fans. What strikes me most is that, in almost every case, I would think the metal fan has a much narrower view of what music is worth listening to than the musicians they idolize. I'm pretty sure that most musicians, even in metal, are open to a wide range of musical styles.
Well anyway, enough rambling for now. ^_^ Oh, I'll end with a joke, a true story from one of my co-workers. Her step father died a little over a week ago, and she attended the funeral with her family and her mother. As they drove back home, her mother was talking about her deceased husband, and said, "We were planning to go get a truckload of wood yesterday." And my co-worker, thinking of her step-father's weak heart (and otherwise not thinking at all), replied, "Well it's a good thing you didn't -- that could have killed him!"
