It feels like forever ago, but I once made a tumblr post about what I thought Melanie Martinez's Cry Baby album plus the EP tracks would look like if all the songs were lowercase, to contrast the PORTALS songs all being uppercase. I still think it would've been a neat idea 🤷‍♀️

But anyway, I bring that up because I got struck with another idea: trying to figure out new names for some of the Cry Baby era songs (most of them outtakes) to better fit the theme of childhood. Like, one of the most important parts Melanie's albums is that the songs for each album fit the theme for said album, from Cry Baby being about birth and childhood to K-12 being about school and growing up, and PORTALS being about spirituality and rebirth. But when looking at all the songs from the Cry Baby era, especially the outtakes, I can't help but notice many of them having names that just...don't strike me as childhood-themed. I'm not criticizing Melanie in her talent, obviously she named each song whatever she felt fit them best, and I still respect that. But I also can't help but think that some songs stick out like sore thumbs when you take the overall theme into consideration.

So, here are my ideas for what to rename certain Cry Baby era songs to better fit the theme:

Bittersweet Tragedy: Melted Ice Cream. The lyrics mention melting a couple times, as well as ice cream near the beginning. I feel like a good metaphor for a relationship falling out could be the feeling of ice cream melting in your hands; it was gone before you could really enjoy it. And of course, kids would be devastated if ice cream melted before they could eat it. Plus, there was a missed opportunity for Melanie to not have a song called Ice Cream - yes, there is I Scream, technically, but no reason to not have both. Two outtakes are literally called Eraser and Erase Her.

Bombs on Monday Morning: Pinky Promise. This was really what kickstarted my idea because even though it's a great song for an outtake, a title like that is not very kid like. Kids should not be exposed to bombs. Period. So, I figured that Pinky Promise is a more childhood-themed title, especially since that's what opens the whole song in the lyrics. Alternatively, it could even be shortened to simply Monday Morning, though perhaps a title like that would fit the theming for K-12 more than Cry Baby since it could also be school-related (although bombs and school going together is not something we like to think about, ever).

Dead To Me: Rainy Days. It's mentioned once in the lyrics to go along with the main premise of the song being present at a funeral in the rain. Personally, I hope that children aren't going around and telling people "you're dead to me" in any context, so try Rainy Days instead. Some kids like rainy days because they can jump in puddles and whatnot, or they don't like rainy days because it means they can't play outside. Either way, kids have some kind of connection to rainy days.

Drowning: Clock in the Kitchen. This was a weird one because to quote the Melanie Martinez wiki, "This song is an unfinished concept with no concrete theme, tune, or even confirmed lyrics. It contains some gibberish as Melanie was trying out different melodies for the song and did not have many lyrics figured out, and its already existing lyrics seem to tell a vague story that doesn't make much sense." Because of this, the only lyric available that I figured could be somewhat childhood-themed is Clock in the Kitchen. I don't know, maybe some kids grew up with cuckoo clocks in their parents' kitchen? Besides, a Cry Baby outtake called Drowning has me thinking of Ben Drowned 💀

Gold Diggin' Love: Shelved. Kids really shouldn't be exposed to gold diggers at a young age. But like Drowning, this was a pretty hard one to rename. I settled with Shelved since it is a word in the lyrics, and it made me think of Toy Story 2, with Mr. Potato Head telling Rex that "Woody's been shelved". Kids definitely would have their favorite toys or other items be "shelved" for one reason or another. Plus, within the context of the song, the titular Gold Digger basically "shelves" her lovers as she goes through them.

Half Hearted: Half and Half. In this case, I'm mostly projecting a part of my own childhood - one time when I was a kid, I ate cereal with half and half instead of milk because we were out of milk and I thought there wasn't a difference. My mom found it funny, but I haven't done that since. Maybe there were kids that made that same mistake, or there could be other instances where "half and half" describes a certain situation? I don't know, maybe this song didn't need a rename.

Haunted: Ghost Stories. I suppose you can argue that this didn't need a rename either since kids might love the scare of a certain place being "haunted", like haunted houses. But in case it was too scary to childhood-themed for the album, Ghost Stories might be a better alternative, since kids also love telling/hearing ghost stories.

Mistakes: Break Rules. I'm kinda reaching at this point, mainly because the first thing I thought of when I saw the title of this song was the fact that some kids were told by their parents that they were "mistakes", and that's heartbreaking. Since the song is about childhood rebellion, I thought that Break Rules or something similar was a slightly nicer name.

Psycho Lovers: Down the Rabbit Hole. I mean, explain to me how a title like Psycho Lovers can be childhood-themed. I don't think you can. Since the lyrics involve asking someone to go down a rabbit hole with them, I thought that'd be a great alternative, especially since it can go hand in hand with Mad Hatter.

Schizo: Favorite Toy. Schizophrenia is definitely a difficult subject for children to comprehend in any context, so I personally find it hard to imagine a kid referring to someone with it as a "schizo" (I could be wrong, of course, maybe it's happening somewhere in the world right now). But with the lyrics presenting Melanie as someone else's "favorite toy" for someone else really made a case for Favorite Toy to be a good alternative title. I mean, kids always have favorite toys.

Trophy Wife: Miss Pageant Queen. Much like Gold Diggin' Love, a trophy wife is something I don't like the idea of children knowing about at a young age, since it could potentially lead them to growing up believing that that's an acceptable term to describe someone as. And since there are kids that compete in pageants, I feel like Miss Pageant Queen was a more fitting name for the theme. Of course, child pageants in general are a bit of a rough subject anyway, in my opinion, but I digress.

You Love I: Puppet Show. I don't know if kids would ever say "you love I" in any context, 'cause I wouldn't as an adult. But I can assume that some kids enjoy puppet shows, so Puppet Show might be a better alternative.

What do you think? Are these good alternative names? I don't completely want to replace their names in my head or anything, I just think that, if Melanie committed to the theme of childhood for all the songs she wrote for the Cry Baby era, these might have been what she'd use, too.

As for her other era songs, I only came up with alternative names for a small handful of After School songs (all but one being outtakes, of course). I just felt like they didn't exactly fit the school them like the others:

Absorb: Project Piece. I'm honestly not sure why Melanie settled on naming it Absorb when something like Project Piece was right there, especially since it fits the song's theme of two people trying to make their relationship work. Working on a project is a perfect metaphor for a couple working on their relationship.

Brain & Heart: Calculated. I actually love the original title, but again, it just doesn't really fit the school theme that much, in my opinion. I feel like Calculated would fit better, since everyone used calculators in school lmao.

Maze: Blame Game. I've personally never been to a school that had a maze, if we're being literal. I know that they exist, but I've never physically seen one. I feel like Blame Game is slightly better since school is full of so much drama, blame games are played all the time.

Paper Cut: Stitches. This one is different from the others because it's not that I don't think the original title is school-themed, 'cause it is. It's just that...there's also a K-12 outtake called Papercut. As you can imagine, fans are annoyed that two different outtakes have far too similar names (they're literally the same name, with one having a space breaking it up), so many of them have opted to refer to it as Stitches instead to reduce confusion.

Phew, that was a lot lmao. What do you think of these? Are they good ideas, or was there no reason for me to even bother? I mainly did this as a fun project, as it were, and I just wanted to share with the class (heh, these school puns).

Also, I left the PORTALS era songs alone because they honestly seem fine on their own, for the most part (though WALKIE TALKIE is an interesting one 🤔)

50th Birthday Party Invitations: Personalization is Vital For Success

50th birthday celebrations have become some of the largest celebrations. It goes without saying, getting to the half-century mark is a worthwhile achievement for any person. 50th birthday invite wording Just as a twenty-first celebration used to be just a sleepover gathering with some pizza and wings.

At the same time, it has incrementally elevated into an opulent shindig being held at the finest hotels and plazas. So however you prefer to commemorate the birthday milestone, it all start-offs when the guests get their invite. A fantastic way to make eye-catching invites is to personify them in a manner that makes the invited guest know they will certainly be missed if they do not turn up. Keep in mind that not everybody desire to celebrate their 50th because it strengthens the fact that their forties are behind them permanently. So be sure to stay clear of using common 50th birthday gathering embellishments and keep in mind, most people turning 50 would much favor a nice aesthetically pleasing party, with good food and good company. And speaking of good company, be imaginative with your invitations so that the invitees show up. After all, what could be more frustrating than throwing a 50th birthday bash for someone and having guests not show up.

Making The Most Out Of Personalized Video Invitations

New Year's Eve Party Invitations Made Quick And Easy

When plotting a New Year's Eve bash, you should be considering how to get the invited guests to show up since you will be contending with other parties going on at the same time. With that in mind, your invitations would best be personalized, exciting, and attention-grabbing. A common invitation usually conveys an average party so make your invitations catch the eye and convey an amazing time. Event planners have the choice to incorporate a theme into the New Year's Eve bash as much or as little as they aspire. Partakers who attend the event have the choice of totally taking advantage of your theme and dressing or carrying on as a special character during the course of the party or just simply attending the soiree and delighting in the environment, food, drinkables, and entertainment offered by the host. An example of a more chic theme for a New Year's Eve event can include a red carpet display where attendees are urged to dress like their preferred motion picture celebrity from an era of their choice. Also, consider the theme could be limited to a specific era with guests forecasted to dress like starlets from the appropriate point in time. This is a very good idea for a New Year's Eve affair theme because quite a few invitees like to dress in their most polished clothing and this would give them the chance to dress to awe. Organizing a themed New Year's Eve celebration is a great deal of fun but it is also certainly far more challenging than arranging a party without a theme just because there is more coordination involved in the planning stage and in striving to ensure all of the aspects of the party fit throughout the theme. Samplings of things that can be added into a party theme are; liquors, activities, food, embellishments, clothing, song selections, solicitations.

Make The Most Of Event Invitations With These Simple Tips

Any time you are in charge of a corporate event, dinner party, Christmas party, wedding, birthday party or workplace party, the first point you should factor in is undoubtedly who you are wanting to invite. The guest list is critical considering that the sum of people attending has a forthright burden on the venue and also on the food list. Regardless of whether you've employed someone else to do your event planning for you, or you've taken on the burden yourself, it's important to produce a list of the invitees and then determine the optimal method to request them to attend.

WandaVision: ‘Subverting’ Good Television - Quill’s Scribbles

(Spoilers for the first five episodes)

Hey everyone! Well... it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The last time I wrote a proper review or Scribble, people still thought the COVID crisis would be over within a month. The poor saps. But I thought that as a special way to mark this year’s Valentines Day, we could take a closer look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s shittiest power couple in their new Disney+ show WandaVision.

The first of many MCU spin-off shows that nobody asked for, broadcast exclusively on Disney’s totally unnecessary streaming platform, WandaVision is about everybody’s favourite whitewashed Nazi experiment and her red sexbot boyfriend as they try to fit into a suburban sitcom neighbourhood without arousing suspicion.

Yes, you read that correctly. The MCU has a sitcom now. My life is now complete.

Sarcasm aside, I was legitimately curious about WandaVision because of its unusual setting. And considering one of my most common criticisms of the MCU is its total lack of creativity, anything that’s even a little bit subversive is bound to attract my attention. Of course ‘subversive’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good.’ I could hand you a canvas smeared with my own shit and call it subversive. That doesn’t necessarily make it good art. And that’s exactly what WandaVision is. A canvas smeared with shit.

So lets split this critical analysis/review/angry bitter rant into two distinct chapters. The first focusing on the plot and setting, and the second focusing on the characters. Okay? Okay.

Chapter 1: Bewitched

Critics seem to be utterly enamoured with the whole sitcom gimmick, and it is a gimmick. As far as I can tell from the episodes I’ve seen, the sitcom setting serves no real purpose whatsoever other than to make the show ‘quirky.’ Which I wouldn’t mind, believe it or not, if the show was actually funny. There’s just one problem. It’s not.

Now in some ways describing why a sitcom doesn’t work is often futile because comedy is largely subjective. What I find funny, you won’t necessarily find funny and vice versa. With WandaVision, however, I won’t have that problem. I can demonstrate to you precisely why WandaVision, objectively, isn’t funny. And it all comes down to one simple thing. The stakes. Or rather the complete and total absence of stakes.

The show makes it very clear from the beginning that none of what we’re seeing is real. The cheesy theme song, the era appropriate special effects (mostly. It’s actually very inconsistent), the joke commercials, and, in the case of the first two episodes, which are in black and white, the appearance of red lights and objects in Scarlet Witch’s general vicinity. (Gee, what a mystery this is).

Basically Wanda has brought Vision back from the dead and created this sitcom world for them to inhabit. I’ll explain the stupidity of this in Chapter 2. The point is none of this is real, and that has a negative effect on the comedy because the very nature of comedy is suffering. Take the plot of the first episode. Wanda and Vision have to prepare a dinner to impress Vision’s boss. If they fail, Vision could lose his job and the couple could be exposed as superheroes. If this were a normal sitcom, it would work. The stakes are clear and it would be satisfying to see the two struggle and overcome the odds. But here, we know it’s not real. If it’s not real, it means there’s no stakes. If there’s no stakes, it means there’s no suffering. If there’s no suffering, there’s no comedy.

It would be one thing if the unfunny sitcom stuff lasted for like the first ten minutes or so before making way for the actual plot, but it doesn’t. Oh no. It doesn’t even last for the first episode. Out of the five episodes I’ve watched, four of them are almost entirely about these unfunny, objectively flawed sitcom homages, each set in a different time period. The fifties, the sixties, and so on. And what’s worse is that nothing that happens in them is plot-relevant. That gets relegated to the last five minutes of an episode. So you’re forced to sit through twenty five minutes of boring slapstick and puns in order to catch even a whiff of actual story. Which begs the question... who is this for exactly? It can’t be entertaining to Marvel fans, who have to slog through all this pointless shit so they can figure out what the fuck is going on. Comedy fans may get a kick out of the sitcom pastiche at first, but after four episodes, surely the joke would wear thin. So why is it in here? Clearly someone in the writer’s room absolutely fell in love with the idea of doing a Marvel sitcom, but nobody put in any time or effort to figure out how it would work in context.

I cannot stress enough how bad the plotting of this series is. As I said, the vast majority of a thirty minute episode is about shitty sitcom plots that aren’t funny and don’t have any impact on the story, only to then tease you with a crumb of actual plot in order to keep you coming back for the next instalment. Admittedly it’s an effective strategy. I was more than ready to quit after Episode 2 until that beekeeper showed up out of the sewer (don’t ask. It’s not important). WandaVision essentially follows the Steven Moffat school of bad writing. String your audience along with the promise that things might get more interesting later on and that all the bullshit that came before will retroactively make sense by the end. Except, as demonstrated with BBC’s Sherlock, that doesn’t work. And even if it did, it wouldn’t justify wasting the audience’s fucking time. And that’s what the majority of WandaVision is. A waste of time.

The only episode that doesn’t follow the sitcom format is the fourth episode. Instead it basically exists to explain all the shit that happened before. The shit that the audience, frankly, are smart enough to figure out for themselves. Wanda created the sitcom world as a way of coping with the loss of Vision, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we got it. Thanks. It doesn’t advance the plot or anything. It’s just a massive info-dump. But by far the lowest point was when Darcy (by far the most annoying character in the first Thor film and is just as obnoxious here) was sat in front of the TV, watching the sitcom and asking the same questions we were. Not even attempting to look for answers. Just reiterating what the audience is thinking. Like this is an episode of fucking Gogglebox.

In the end it becomes apparent why the series is structured the way that it is. It’s to hoodwink people into subscribing to Disney’s stupid streaming service. If you think about it, there was no reason for WandaVision to be a TV series other than to lure gullible fans in with a piece-meal story buried in a mountain of crap. This isn’t a TV show. It’s what is cynically known in the world of big business executives as ‘content.’ They’re not interested in entertaining the audience. Instead they crave ‘engagement’, which isn’t the same thing. Watching WandaVision is like staring into the void, waiting for something to happen, while Disney charge you for the privilege.

Chapter 2: I Love Lucy

So the plot sucks balls. What about the characters? Surely if Wanda and Vision are likeable at least, it’ll give us something to cling onto.

Well as I was watching the first episode, it suddenly hit me that I couldn’t remember anything that happened to them in previous films. I knew Vision died, but other than that, I couldn’t tell you significant plot details or their personalities or anything. Not a great start.

See, up until now, Vision and Scarlet Witch have been little more than background characters. So already there’s an uphill struggle to get us invested in their relationship, especially considering we haven’t actually seen that relationship develop. In Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Scarlet Witch is killing people because she’s pissed off about Tony Stark killing people (you work that one out) until all of a sudden she stops and joins the good guys because the script said so. Vision meanwhile is introduced as a convenient deus ex machina to beat Ultron and gets no real personality other than he’s a robot. Captain America: Civil War comes the closest to giving Wanda a story and personality of her own as it’s her actions that cause the Sokovia Accords to come into effect, but she never gets any real growth or payoff as the film is heavily focused on Cap and Iron Man’s penis measuring contest. And as for Vision, all he does in the film is accidentally cripple War Machine. No real character or arc there as such. And then we have Avengers: Infinity War, where Wanda and Vision are now sporadically in love and on the run until that pesky Josh Brolin, looking like a CGI cross between Joss Whedon and a grumpy grape, comes along and rips out Vision’s Infinity Stone to power up his golden glove of doom, and the film treats this like a tragic moment, except... it isn’t. Because we haven’t really had the time to properly get to know these characters and see their romance blossom. So instead it just comes off as hollow and forced.

WandaVision has the exact same problem. Apparently Wanda was so distraught about Vision’s death that she broke into a SWORD base, stole his corpse, brought it back from the dead... somehow, and then enslaved an entire town of people to create an idyllic lifestyle for her and her hubby while broadcasting it as a sitcom to the outside world... for some reason. Putting aside the dubious morality of it all, it’s impossible to really sympathise with Wanda or her supposed grief because we’ve barely spent any time with her. Had the Marvel movies taken the time to properly explore the characters and show us their relationship grow and develop, this might have had more emotional resonance. But no, it just happens. In one film they barely speak to each other and in the next they’re a couple. No effort to explore how they feel about each other or any of the problems that may arise trying to date a robot. It just happens and we’re just supposed to care. Well I’m sorry, but I don’t care. You’re going to have to try a little bit harder than that I’m afraid. What’s worse is that, thanks to the whole fake sitcom thing, it’s impossible to really become invested in Wanda and her plight because the show has to constantly keep us at arms length at all times in order to keep up the pretence that this bullshit is somehow mysterious.

Looking through the WandaVision tag, it amuses me how many people say that she’s acting out of character. And yeah, her actions are a bit of a head scratcher. Why would an Eastern European’s ideal life be an American sitcom? Why a sitcom? Why kidnap an entire town? Why keep changing the decade? None of it makes sense, but you’re wrong for thinking that Wanda is behaving out of character for the simple reason that Wanda has never actually had a character. In fact, ironically, Wanda mind controlling an entire town and forcing them to do her bidding is probably the one consistent thing about her as she did this in Age Of Ultron. In interviews, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany described how they used actors like Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick Van Dyke as influences, which is really funny because they’re straight up admitting they don’t have characters and even now they’re still not playing the characters, instead emulating the work of far better actors.

As I was watching the show, it became abundantly clear that not only do Marvel not have the faintest idea what they wanted to do with these characters, but they also straight up don’t give a shit about these characters. Wanda in particular has had a rough time under the tyrannical regime of the House of Mouse. First they cast Elizabeth Olsen, a white woman, to play a Romani character, then systematically erasing her Jewish roots, even going so far as to put a cross in her bedroom in Civil War, and now the character is being butchered even more by forcing her into an American sitcom housewife role that she apparently willingly chose for herself, which is laughable. I mean say what you like about Magneto in the X-Men films, at least they actually depicted his Jewish culture. At least they recognised his Jewish background was important (though not important enough to cast a Jewish actor apparently). Wanda’s steady cultural erasure over the years is incredibly insidious and judging by Olsen’s comments in interviews, where she called Wanda’s comic book outfit a quote ‘gypsy thing’ unquote, it seems nobody has an ounce of fucking respect for the character or the culture she’s supposed to be representing. (and to all those kissing her arse saying it was a slip of the tongue, she has been repeatedly called out for using the slur in the past, so at this point I’d describe her behaviour as wilful ignorance)

If you want further proof of how much Marvel doesn’t seem to care about Wanda, look no further than her brother Pietro, aka Quicksilver. At the end of Episode 5, Wanda brings Pietro back from the dead, except it’s not Pietro. It’s Peter Maximoff, the Quicksilver from the X-Men films played by Peter Evans, who coincidentally is not Jewish or Romani either. So Quicksilver has the dubious honour of not only being whitewashed three times, but also twice within the same franchise. But should we really be surprised at this point? It’s Marvel after all. The same company that whitewashed the Ancient One in Doctor Yellowface and claimed it wasn’t racist because Tilda Swinton is ‘Celtic’. But now I’m going off topic. My point is that this isn’t a simple case of recasting an actor like Mark Ruffalo replacing Edward Norton as the Hulk. WandaVision actually acknowledges the recast in-universe, which makes no sense. Why would Wanda bring back her brother, only to make him look like a different person? We the audience may be familiar with this version of Quicksilver, but she isn’t. That would be like me bringing my Grandad back to life and making him look like Ian McKellen. He’d be perfectly charming, I’m sure, but he wouldn’t be my Grandad. 

If Marvel really cared about the characters or narrative consistency, they would have brought Aaron Taylor Johnson back. Instead, now they have absorbed 20th Century Fox into the hellish Disney abyss, they use X-Men’s Quicksilver as a means to keep viewers from switching off and so that people will write stupid articles and think pieces about whether the rest of the X-Men will show up in the MCU. It’s like dangling your keys in front of a toddler’s face to distract them from the rotting corpse of a raccoon lying face down in the corner of the room.

And it’s here where I decided to stop watching the show because fuck Disney.

Epilogue: One Foot In The Grave

You know, I am sick and tired of the so called ‘professional’ critics bending over backwards to praise these god awful films and shows when it’s so clear to anyone with a functioning brain cell how bad they truly are. WandaVision is without a doubt one of the most cynically produced and poorly structured TV shows I’ve ever seen. Its riffs on classic sitcoms are pointless and self-indulgent, the writing is terrible, the characters are unlikable and unsympathetic, and it’s entirely emblematic of what the entire MCU has become of late. And it’s only going to get worse as Disney drowns us with more ‘content’ to keep the plebs ‘engaged’. In short; pathetic.

Album Discussion: The Suburbs

Last week I felt like I didn’t have much time to pump an album review out. Was going to be in the lab all day, had work in the night, wanted to cover something quick. Then I finished really early, and had plenty of time in the afternoon to finish things off. This week I am in the same situation as far as scheduling, but someone’s bloody using equipment I need, so I’ve got a bit of extra time now. Time to talk about a >1hr 16 track record!

Also last week, I covered an album that I felt was more interesting from a meta level than it is musically. This week I’m talking about an album that I know nothing of the meta for.

The Suburbs I was reminded of recently. Mostly because I ran into the person who bought me the CD for the first time in like a year. I understand Arcade Fire have A Reputation as far as bands go, but the thing is: I have no idea what it is. I haven’t followed them at all, I don’t know whether they’re considered good or not, I haven’t even seen any of the music videos. I have never deliberately listened to an Arcade Fire song outside of this album.

But I do like this album. So.

Okay the one thing I do know is what the album is about. It’s about growing up in the suburbs of…I think Texas somewhere. I could look this up, but I refuse. The result of this is that the whole thing is intensely nostalgic, full of reminiscence and wistfulness, childhood innocence and what growing up is like. It’s one of those, you know? That does, however, make it fairly easy to like, because I think a lot of people are nostalgic for their childhoods.

(yeah so the only music videos for this one are at the very start and very end. this is going to be a bit of a wall of words.)

This is characterised by the opening track, which is also the album’s title track: The Suburbs. It’s opening with a very folksy acoustic guitar and piano, and longing for that childhood is its modus operandi. It is, however, tinged by the anxieties of that era- growing up in the shadow of the cold war is going to leave an impact on anyone, and that cultural climate is also going to be running through the album. I think the most poignant section of the song lyrically is the start of the third verse- wishing to become a parent, so they can live vicariously through their child, show them their childhood world before the reality and the memory are completely lost. Okay that’s kinda heavy moving on- the track is pretty much built around that piano/acoustic bit, sounding relatively upbeat but coloured by these lonesome strings running through the background. It’s very effective of conveying the feeling- which is something that comes up quite a bit over the course of the album. The Suburbs is one of my favourite tracks on this album, and having it come right at the front makes it a very solid stage-setter.

Track two is Ready to Start, a faster, rockier track with this grimy bassline running through the verses contrasting the relatively bright instrumentation of the chorus. Considering the themes of the song, about working for the man, dude, and trying to escape that sort of life, it’s fairly fitting, though it’s a very different sort of nostalgia than the previous track. The instrumentation gives the whole thing this sense urgency, which is enhanced by some of the lyrics- I mean the track is called Ready to Start, isn’t it. I feel like this song would be great to try and hype yourself up for something you don’t really want to do, and I’m not sure how many songs we have specifically for that feeling.

Our next song is called Modern Man, and it feels like tumbling through a confusing life. God, I’m really getting pensive today. I feel like this is a lot because this album resonates a lot more emotionally for me than musically. I’m someone with a very weird sense of nostalgia, seeing as my childhood is pretty effectively defined into three segments, and I tend to fixate on one of them because it’s The Weird One. I’m nostalgic for high school which is when I was nostalgic for living abroad which is when I was nostalgic for when I still lived in Perth, which I do now, but I don’t know anyone from back then, so there’s a whole sense of longing, and it’s something I’ve always had, and that’s funky. And I’m still young, this isn’t going to change, it’s going to get worse, and eghhhh I’m supposed to be talking about music. I don’t really have much to say about Modern Man, I guess. It’s aight, the previous two were better, but here I am 800 words into an album discussion, and I’ve gone through all of 3 songs on a 16 track album, so maybe expect this to be a slog.

Rococo at least makes an impact real quick, with fuckin psychotic strings right at the start that’s kind of a shock to the system, especially compared to the relatively mild instrumentation the rest of the song provides. I think that’s a fairly appropriate tone for a song about looking at #thecoolkids, bemusement tinged with utter stark bewilderment. I think I’m too young to really get this, I guess. The song’s title regards an art movement that sounds extremely pretentious and fake deep, frankly, but considering the point of the song is that you don’t bloody know what Rococo means, that’s probably also fitting. I kinda wish the strings were more present throughout the song than they were, they add this existential dread to the track that I do think the later sections are missing somewhat.

Speaking of strings, Empty Room is up next, and it’s one of my favourite tracks as well. It opens with the strings but they’re fast and energetic and they’re going to blow right past you. I thought this track was in like the second half of the album, but nope, here it is. This is also where the album’s second vocalist takes the lead for a bit (she only does for like 3 scattered tracks) and she’s genuinely great here. The songs chugs like an old train, in a way that reminds me a lot of other songs; in particular, the bit between the chorus and second verse (and chorus/outro) reminds me a lot of Teach me About Dying by Holy Holy- I can’t unhear “teach me about dying, teach me about dying-dying” over that instrumental. Despite its desolate lyricism, this song’s energy is genuinely excellent, and it carries really well through the whole thing. I can’t think of a lot of songs that start on this sort of tempo and have it run the whole way through- not to keep referencing other songs, but it’s very Go with the Flow by Queens of the Stone Age. And that’s like in the top 3 QotSA songs for me, so.

It’s only just struck me how much track 6, City With no Children, reminds me of There There by Radiohead. Its mostly the percussion, I think. That’s fucking high praise, but it’s also about as far as the comparison goes. The song is pretty okay outside of that, this theme of a town left lifeless by the commercialism and capitalism of the ultra-rich and what that does to people. Maybe that’s just my reading of it, I do have a bias for this sort of thing, but I challenge you to find another one. Looking on Genius is cheating. I do like the riff the track is built around, but it gets old eventually, since it doesn’t develop at all as the track progresses- lost potential, I suppose.

The next song is the first part of the album’s first of two two-parters, Half Light I, because apparently this one is trying to be a long-running drama show now. With that said, this ballad is kinda gorgeous, and yet also kinda extremely boring? Which is a frustrating place to be, frankly. I get the feeling this is an opinion that would get me crucified, but aside from those strings what fuck, the song just isn’t doing anything for me. Maybe it’s because it’s kinda almost the halfway point and I’m just getting tired, maybe it’s just a generational and cultural divide between America/Australia and 90s-00s/00s-10s and I don’t Get It. But I’m afraid to say this one doesn’t land.

Half Light II (No Celebration), for the record, is one I enjoy much more. The instrumentation is a lot more fun, the tone is a lot more pained (and y’all know I love me some angst), as the rose-tinted lenses of the previous half are replaced by the jade of someone growing up through the GFC (and just, in general). Despite being a two-part song, the halves are very different, a deliberate dichotomy representing two facets of that same look backwards. I feel like this isn’t like other two-part songs I’ve heard before, in that you can kinda appreciate the halves separately- or, in my case, one and not the other.

Track 9, and welcome more officially to the Second Half, with Suburban War. It’s very much about reminiscing about old friends, and I think I’m going to wax personal for a bit, because I have very little to say about the song musically. I mentioned earlier that I basically don’t know anyone from back when I was a kid, and that’s kind of a product of what my childhood looked like. It’s hard to have a “childhood friend” that you still keep up with when you spend 5 extremely crucial, defining years somewhere away from where all of them are. When you leave at 7 years old and don’t come back until you’re almost a teenager. People change so quickly at that age, and I’m no exception, and so I just didn’t have the ability to relate to those same people that long afterwards, even if I could find them. I don’t resent the experience of growing up in such a fractured manner, but it means I have a fundamentally different experience to that discussed in this album. At the same time, as I listen to the closing moments of this song, with the line repeated, “All my old friends, they don’t know me now”, I can’t help but notice the similarity. The writer’s friends don’t know them because they’ve grown up, changed fundamentally as people, whereas I don’t know my old friends in a much more literal sense.

Our next song is a bit more fun. Month of May is unequivocally a rock song, as opposed to the..indie? folk? of most of its surrounds. Much like Empty Room, it’s driven by its tempo and instrumentation, but it’s a bit less dour than that one, almost a bit oldie in its rock and roll swagger. The song isn’t so utterly different that it wouldn’t fit on the album, the traces of The Suburbs still roll through the whole thing, the same guitar and percussion tones driven up a couple notches on the ol’ Mohs scale. Quite solid, ultimately, in my opinion.

Track 11 is Wasted Hours. I think it’s a kind of appropriate title, not because it’s a waste of time, but because it just kinda feels like a nothing song as part of the album. Like, it is unquestionably Part Of The Album, sonically and thematically, but I deadass would not notice if it was missing from the record. Sorry if this one is your favourite, but this one isn’t for me.

Deep Blue, on the other hand, is the song that got me into the album. There’s really something about this track, this sense of discomfort with the passage of time, that really wormed its way into me. It’s a shockingly cold song for this acoustic instrumentation that’s usually associated with quite the opposite. The piano feels desperate, the guitars grim, and there’s actual synths hiding in here- the song relates to technology, after all. It’s concern for the future of humanity, of the youth, and for, well, the Suburbs, through the lens of watching that match between chess Grandmaster Kasparov and the A.I. Deep Blue in 1996. Go watch the Down the Rabbit Hole on that if you haven’t already (and have a few hours), by the way, it’s utterly excellent.

I can’t really describe how Deep Blue makes me feel. There’s just something about it. I feel like if I hear this song again in 10 years, it would genuinely bring me to tears- it feels like loss in a way, and not the meme.

We Used to Wait has a fun instrumentation, glittery piano and that funky guitar noodling in the background, but unfortunately the chorus kinda lets it down for me. I just do not care for it, it’s really built on a vocal line that really doesn’t track for me personally. Like, I’m just young enough that a lot of the theme of the track is utterly unrelatable to me- I hail from an era that is post- the change the track is referring to. I’m focussing a lot this time around about how the songs make me feel personally, but I think that’s kind of the appropriate tack for this album in particular- like the idea of nostalgic reminiscence is so inexorably tied to your own personal experiences that there’s no way around those experiences clouding your perception of this album, and with that, how well you end up liking it. I bet this whole thing hits way harder for someone born in the same couple years as this band.

We’re up to the second two-parter, Sprawl I (Flatland), kind of the finale for the whole thing. I mean, in I’s case, it’s certainly that emotionally. The song is so utterly down, it’s lost in the urban sprawl the title and lyrics describe, and with that comes a very quiet track. Moody strings and guitar, that eventually build during the fourth verse (there is no chorus and they’re short). It does eventually resolve on a more positive note, at least, one that’s hopefully relatable to many of us- eventually, we find our emotional home is, and it’s often not where we grew up.

Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) is quite the different perspective. It’s got that other lead vocalist (I could look up her name but I won’t), it’s got a pulsing beat, and it has much more energy to work with. There are synths on this track that are absent from almost the entire rest of the album, but their introduction here, right at the end, is extremely cool. They’re cool, they’re clear, and they’re thematically relevant! I just really like the vibe of this track, and the way it trails off is similarly very good. Would recommend.

But of course there is one final track. Kind of. The Suburbs (continued) is basically a dark reprise of the album’s opener, shaded with more regret than that track is, more strings-y and whispered. It’s very short, but it acts as an appropriate closer for the whole thing.

And of course, that’s The Suburbs. In retrospect, I have a bit more mixed thoughts about this than I thought. There’s some really high highs, and some things that are just kind of bleh, but any album of this length is bound to have some misses. While I was browsing Genius to make sure I had the lyrics right for some tracks, I saw this record described as a Masterpiece, but I’m not sure that shoe fits- at least, not for me. The personal nature of this album, and anyone’s theoretical relationship with it, are such that I don’t think it can be given such a broad, universal title. I like the album as a whole quite a bit, but I personally wouldn’t call it a masterpiece.

It also doesn’t inspire me to go after more Arcade Fire. I’m actually perfectly content having them in my mind as this solitary piece, complete in its own way. Oh, they have like four other albums, but to me, Arcade Fire is The Suburbs. I don’t know why I’ve decided this, but it just works for me. So I’m sorry to any massive AF fans, but I did just dedicated 2.7k words to this album, so I’m sure you’re all satisfied.

God, next time I am going to have to cover something shorter, for my own sanity if nothing else.

Italian Doomers BRETUS Tell Ghostly Tales on New LP, ‘Magharia’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

By Billy Goate

Artwork by DamianaMerante

Hailing from the City of the Two Seas, Italian doomers BRETUS return with a new album of ghost stories. Longtimers know that Bretus and Doomed & Stoned practically grew up together. Though the band has been active since the turn of the century, our first exposure came with their debut full-length 'In Onirica' (2012) and subsequently we formed a friendship with the Catanzaro doomers that continues to this very day. It's hard to believe they're already over two decades old (okay, 20 years young, if you like). And what do they have to show for it? A handful of LPs, an EP, and a split with fellow Italianos Black Capricorn.

If you're as much a fan of vintage horror movies, H.P. Lovecraft lore, mysticism, and the occult as Zagarus (vox), Ghenes (guitar), Janos (bass), and Striges (drums), there's a whole world of story and sound awaiting your deep dive into the Bretus catalog. Adding to their already excellent discography, a fifth album now reveals itself: 'Magharia' (2021).

I won't spoil my interview with the band (see below) if I tell you that the album concerns, shall we say, several tales of the supernatural variety. An ominous gong is struck to the backdrop of monastic chant as Magharia opens in epic fashion "Celebration of Gloom," a song characterized by a chugging proto-trash tempo, trve metal stylings, and Gothic vocals appropriate to it's subject. It's a rather grim account of a certain sacrilegious priest and his daliences with young women of the church. As a preacher's kid, I've seen this kind of thing play out a hundred times and can assure you these sweeping romances between clergy and laity never end well. In this case, it winds up with a ghoulish rite and a victim's vengeance.

"In the sky lightning strikes...wicked laments rise from the ground." Welcome to "Cursed Island." True to the spirit of the lyrics, this track really let's it all hang out, with quasi operatic vocals that occasionally erupt in maniacal laughter (reminding me vintage Reagers-era Saint Vitus, with its lusty swagger). And why not? This is after all about the mystery that surrounds one of the most haunted islands on earth.

Thus far, the record's been sporting a pretty up-beat pulse, so surely you're ready for some good old fashion doom? "Moonchild's Scream" concerns a albino girl accused of being possessed by the devil for her appearance. One day, she disappears in the dungeons of a castle and legend has it that her cries can still be heard every five years during the Summer Solstice. Doesn't get more doom than that, folks!

After a brief interlude ("Necropass"), we arrive at my favorite track of Magharia. "Nuraghe" concerns the spirit of a woman judged and condemned for a crime she was innocent of still roams among the ancient stones. Boy, the ancients sure did have a hang-up with free-spirited, independent women, didn't they? The song itself is possessed by the spirit of Pentagram in its biting guitar work and rhythmic attack. Love the riffage on this one! Some of it could have been played out just a little more for my taste, like the all-too-brief Soundgardenesque motif at the two-minute mark. It returns a minute later, again in brief. C'mon Ghenes, let your inner Kim Thayil loose! Maybe we can convince them to improv at this point with a bitchin' guitar solo at their next festival appearance. Then again, perhaps this fits artistically with the song, which speaks of obscure "grim dancing bats" and a ghost that haunts through swift shadows passing over glimmers of light. Once again, Zagrus expressive song style comes through to distinguish this as a gem of the genre. I shall be revisiting it on my personal playlist often.

"Headless Ghost" strikes graceful Goatsnake groove as the yarn is spun about the restless and tormented soul of an ancient Roman warrior who has risen from his place of rest. All he wants is the skull that was looted from his place of burial. Give it back to him! "No one will be spared tonight," the lyrics warn, as the song shifts down to a dire doom dirge as the night unveils a strange moon and the wanderings of a cursed soul, seeking his head and not more. "He is living again in this hell."

"The Bridge of Damnation" is one of the creepiest of the record, said to be about "a bridge, a young boy, and his three torturers." The mood is quite dark, with esoteric atmosphere, reverberating vocalizations, guitar and bass trading off notes. Oh, and did I mention this tale from the crypt involves death and resurrection, as well? The riffmaking and drumming are absolutely on point, as is the singing -- which by now in the record I'm not only am accustomed to, but have grown to admire. Another keeper!

"Sinful Nun" winds and grinds as Zagarus croons about the inner torment of a Sister who has never gotten over her beloved, who died under such unspeakably tragic circumstances that she decided to consecrate herself to God in celibacy. However, her vows are in vain as she still pines for her long lost lover. The verses are sung to the accompaniment of a galloping tempo, which seems to represent the fevered anguish of a soul forever stricken by grief and the haunted memories of lost love. This is juxtaposed in the chorus by a cursed riff that seems to speak as the Hand of Fate itself. "Farewell to this life," are the Sinful Nun's final words.

At last, we reach the album's namesake and though "Magharia" is entirely instrumental, it would be a mistake to assume you know what it's going to do. Around the four-minute mark, I had to check and make sure I was listening to the same album, as dark synth busted out a metronomic rhythm, leading to a declamatory section of keyboards to accompany the math-like guitar play and an improvisation of almost creepy seventies-sounding prog, which after its playful fit dissipates suddenly in a bluesy collapse.

Bretus have cooked up a remarkable horror soundtrack that, though it speaks of ancient lore, is very much a fitting backdrop to the unreality of our own times. Fitting somewhere on the stylistic spectrum between Candlemass and Paul Chain, Reverend Bizarre and Cardinals Folly, Margharia may be the band's finest effort to date. Certainly, it rewards repeated listens, and will haunt you for many years to come. Look for the record to drop this weekend (pre-order here), with multiple physical formats releasing via The Swamp Records (compact disc), Burning Coffin Records (cassette), and Overdrive Records (vinyl). Until then, you can stream it all, right now, right here!

Give ear...

Magharia by BRETUS

An Interview with Bretus

What is the concept behind the new album and what themes do you explore?

Musically the new record is most "in your face" than the previous album. Also our approach to the recording was different. We rehearsed and arranged together more than before. The result is an album more raw to us. It is a concept album born around different italian old ghost tales. Some of these is supposed to be legend or myth, who knows.

When did you write it? Was it during the pandemic lockdowns?

We had more ideas about new stuff long before the pandemia arrived. We spent this time working on the pre-production of the tracks.

Can you give us a track-by-track explanation of each song on the album?

For sure!

"Celebration of Gloom" is a strange song because there are many influences in it. Including a solo flute in the middle of the track. However is a very loud and gloomy song.

"Cursed Island" probably is the most rock 'n' roll song of the album. If you know what I mean. Rock in the attitude. Also the first video of the album.

"Moonchild's Scream" is 100% pure Doom with a heavy mid-section.

"Necropass" is like Caronte travelling the damned souls across the Stige River.

"Nuraghe" is a heavy oriented track with a very dark feeling.

"Headless Ghost" has a more stoner trend than the others and in the end there is a psycho riffing.

"The Bridge of Damnation" includes our '80s dark influences into our sound, probably the most haunted track of the album. The story is based upon an old weird story that happened in our native city, Catanzaro.

"Sinful Nun" is like an experiment and neither of us can explain really what it is... ah ah aha! For sure the most heavy track of all.

Finally "Magharia." You cannot believe it but the idea comes from a Who's album, Quadrophenia. Either of us wrote a part of the song. The result is a kind of horror soundtrack.

Magharia by BRETUS

How do you feel that your basic style or approach to song composition has changed since you first started writing songs in the early days?

You already know a lot of things about us, we know you from so long ago! Please don't ask how old we are. (laughs) Basically our approach is the same from the beginning. Of course we listen to a lot of new stuff during these years so every album brings different "colors."

Where are you most looking forward to playing live once pandemic restrictions are eased?

Everywhere! We are angry for live gigs or simply to drink beers with friends.

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After folklore came out I developed this crackpot theory that I really love even if it might not have been something Taylor actually did on purpose, and I forgot to post about it on tumblr so here it is, my Grand Unified Theory of folklore:

Ok, so like, we know that a lot of the songs on folklore aren't from Taylor's own POV, but some of them are. I think that, inspired by the fact that she's also been working on this project to re-record all her old albums, Taylor decided to revisit ideas from each of her old albums on folklore, maybe kind of thinking of it as like, "if I were writing this particular album today, what new song would I put on it." Some people may dispute this count, but I feel like 9 of the tracks on folklore (not including "the lakes") are actually from Taylor's own POV, and each of these 9 tracks corresponds to each of her 8 studio albums, from the debut through folklore, except that rep got two, because she wanted to represent both of the personas she used on that album. Are you ready for this galaxy brain analysis, ok:

Debut album: "the 1"

Being about a past relationship that's remembered fondly, it kind of recalls both "Tim McGraw" and "Stay Beautiful." I'm actually not 100% confident that she meant this one to be taken as autobiographical, but if it isn't entirely a real story, then that's also appropriate to the debut album, since she hadn't actually had any real relationships to write about yet, and was just kind of making stuff up. Also, if my theory is actually correct, then I think the title itself is a clue--to make you look beyond the word "one" the way it's used in the lyrics, and think of the actual number 1, as in TS1.

Fearless: "seven"

I mean, obviously this is a call back to "Fifteen," no? "Fifteen" is about a girl she was friends with at 15, "seven" is about a girl she was friends with at 7. Both look back on what it felt like to be that age, and both acknowledge the darker sides of childhood.

Speak Now: "this is me trying"

I have two takes on this one to tie it back to Speak Now. One, it's in the same confessional style she used so much on that album, and definitely fits the theme of being something she wants to say to someone. I also think (and this could be a stretch, but) it can be read as a follow-up to "Long Live"--basically a love letter to her fans, but one that reflects her older self, and is more honest about the fact that her life isn't all triumph and confetti. She talked so often during the rep era about how she'd been afraid that the fans wouldn't be interested anymore after her hiatus, and in this song she says "I didn't know if you'd care if I came back--I have a lot of regrets about that" and there's the line about "pouring out my heart to a stranger." I mean I think it definitely can also be read as a more conventional love song, so it could just as easily be addressed to her boyfriend, but I think it works both ways.

RED: "the last great american dynasty"

It's a song about real people who lived in the 1940s (like "Starlight"), and also addresses how celebrity culture chews up women and spits them out, and makes a link between herself and the woman in the song in the final verse (like "The Lucky One")

1989: "mirrorball"

This one seems to be less a reflection on the album itself, than about what life was like for her during that era--very conscious of the fact that she was over exposed, very anxious to please everyone, aware of being on the precipice of losing everything, but still trying to be the entertainer she felt she had to be. Kind of a dark side of "New Romantics," maybe.

reputation: "mad woman" + "peace"

Taylor had two "voices" on rep, one that was this sort of angry monster Taylor that was putting on a performance in response to the way her public image had been distorted, and the other that was speaking more with her "real" voice, and was just very anxious that no one would ever want to stay with her. So there's one for each, here. "mad woman" continuing the spirit of "I Did Something Bad" and "Look What You Made Me Do"; "peace" in the spirit of "Delicate" and "Dancing With Our Hands Tied."

Lover: "invisible string"

Exactly one (1) happy love song on this album, so of course it goes with Lover lol. And the line about "purple-pink skies" feels like a deliberate reference to the album cover.

folklore/evermore: "epiphany" (+ "the lakes")

I crafted this theory before "the lakes" was released, so at first I was just going to say that "epiphany" was the Taylor POV track that actually "belongs" to folklore--she's the narrator, in a way, but it's focused on putting herself in the point of view of other people, which reflects the way in which all the other tracks on folklore, as well as most of the tracks on evermore, were from the POV of characters she invented, rather than telling her own story. But taking "the lakes" into consideration, I think it also ties into that theme in a way, because it is kind of about not wanting to be observed, not wanting to make everything in her life public. Which fits with the idea of her moving toward writing songs about imaginary people, kind of saying like, yes, my life is real without me having to write about all of it for public consumption. And maybe, in retrospect, I should have taken the fact that there were actually two songs from her POV that could have "belonged" to folklore as a hint that there was secretly a whole second album that was more of the same kind of stuff, haha.

OK, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

200924 SuperM Talk 'Super One' & Finding Unity In The Covid Era

Last year, K-pop group SuperM made history when their self-titled debut EP premiered at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. A miscellany of a boy band featuring seven cornerstones from four different acts signed to South Korean company SM Entertainment, the newly formed act’s star power and the virality of their immensely memeable first single "Jopping" made them a must-watch act of 2020. Now, they’re back with their first LP, Super One.

Out on Sept. 25, SuperM's first full-length album features 15 tracks, some that listeners have heard before, like pre-release singles "100" and "Tiger Inside," and B-sides like "Dangerous Woman" and "With You" that the act has performed in the past during concerts and televised performances. Split almost evenly between songs that are performed predominantly in either English or Korean and fronted by the lead track "One," a blend of two B-sides, "Monster" and "Infinity," Super One is all about meshing different elements together, whether it’s members of SHINee, EXO, NCT 127 and WayV into one whole, or running the gamut of different genres and languages in ways that are all at once familiar and innovative for members of some of K-pop's biggest acts.

Throughout all the multitudes of Super One, however, is one overall theme—serving up a soundtrack perfect for the age of corona. "I think we tried really hard to unify the messaging through the lyrics and through that bring a message of hope and unity to our fans and everyone who listens to it," said Taemin, the most senior member of the group, active in the industry since debuting with the group SHINee in 2008.

Coming out since the world first began reeling from the changes and ongoing impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Super One spends its length motivating listeners through a freewheeling medley of energetic, vibrant electro-pop anthems and mellowing out to offer up lackadaisical, breezy moments on hopeful tracks. Whether it’s the optimistic, sweet bounce of "Better Days" and "Wish You Were Here" or the hint of separate-but-together partying euphoria on "Together at Home" and the smooth sexiness of the groove on "Drip" serving up the type of confidence that comes with good times, SuperM have delivered an album that is oh-so-very 2020 but will live long beyond December.

This interview was edited for clarity, and conducted in both English and Korean.

You’re about to release Super One into the world, following the release of "100" and "Tiger Inside." How does it feel to be sharing your first LP after last year’s debut EP?

Mark: We feel really thrilled to let the whole world see it. We’ve prepared a lot for it. “100” and “Tiger Inside” were just the singles that only lead up to the main album, so we’re pretty excited.

Taeyong: Because we’ve been working on this first full-length album for such a long time, we think it’s that much more meaningful for everyone. We were really thinking of our fans when we were putting this all together. Because we released two singles ahead of the release, we hope our fans and everyone will have the same and rising expectations for “One.” We hope everyone receives a lot of strength and positive vibes through this album.

What is the meaning of Super One to you?

Mark: We believe that it is very appropriate for the situation that the whole world is going through, the message that we have. Not only are we trying to say that we can overcome all of our problems and all these difficulties as we work together, we also believe that—if you see in the album, there are a lot of songs in the playlist where it has an encouraging message. We just want to spread positivity around the world and really bring hope to the listeners, saying, "We can overcome it all." With that positive message, we really want to bring everyone together. That’s pretty much how we, SuperM, were brought together as well. Though we may be all scattered in different ways, when we come together we become very super. I guess that’s the main message and the aspiration also of Super One.

Your first album debuted at No. 1 on the Stateside Billboard 100 chart, so expectations must be high for this album. What sort of response are you hoping for now that Super One is going to be heard by the world?

Lucas: I just hope that, throughout this whole worldwide pandemic situation that we’re all going through, listeners and fans will receive strength and hope through our music.

Why is "One" the perfect single for SuperM to release Super One through, following the earlier releases of "100" and "Tiger Inside"?

Mark: We always thought that having "100" come out first, then "Tiger Inside" leading to "One," that whole picture was a strategy that we thought would be best because we wanted to build up as much anticipation as we can. We wanted to build our fans’ expectations a lot as well. Having "One" come out as the final product was something we knew was right because the song itself has a lot of power in it, it holds a lot of what we can sing and rap about. The potential of the song holds what SuperM can really express. I feel like "One" was one of those tracks we really wanted to explode with. It’s a song that represents the album the best way.

You mentioned that you were sharing a unified picture in releasing these trio of singles one after another. What were you trying to relay through this trilogy?

Mark: I feel like each is great in their own way, but they all are connected as well. They’re all very different. Even if you just see “100” and “Tiger Inside,” the concept, the visuals, the pictures, the sounds, they’re all really, really different. But if you see the whole playlist of the album, they’re actually quite connected because all the songs have one central message on the album. “100,” we really wanted to give our 100% power and energy for fans to receive. “Tiger Inside,” the message was to not hide your power, to not hide the inner wildness you have inside and really release it out. And “One” is to bring all that energy together to overcome something we think we may not be able to but we can if we work together. It’s all about overcoming and collaboratively working together to overcome something we all want.

“One” is a blend of two songs, “Monster” and “Infinity,” how does it feel for you to be blending these songs together?

Ten: I think the concept that we put two songs and mix it together is very new, but also SHINee’s [2012 single] “Sherlock” is a mix of two songs, “Clue & Note.” With this album we think it’s a good idea to put the songs together because both songs, “Monster” and “Infinite” are very strong, they’re both ear-catching. That’s why I think it’s a very good idea to put it together, and I think the fans are going to love the mix too.

Speaking of… Taemin, firstly, congratulations on the release of your new album Never Gonna Dance Again!

Taemin: Thank you!

You’ve done this blending of songs into a single before as SHINee. How does it feel revisiting this creative style again with SuperM?

Taemin: I personally think that this is one of K-pop’s biggest strengths, the fact that there are so many different styles of music and genres that can be mixed into one song and they’re all so catchy. Since we [already] did this with “Clue” and “Note,” it was really cool for me to see that creative process happen again. If you think of K-pop in general, it includes so many different styles of music. Even in one song, you’ll see multiple genres, multiple drops, multiple tempos, key changes, etc. I actually heard that when the producing team was making this song, it was really hard to make it sound really seamless and natural, making sure the key and tempo and everything matched when they mixed these two songs. But I personally think it was really fun to see this all come together and happen. Seeing a more creative and fun kind of music production process is always what makes K-pop new and exciting all the time.

The album is bilingual, and split pretty evenly between English and Korean tracks. How do you feel about showing this duality? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it’s ever been done before in K-pop, splitting an album with different language tracks quite in this way.

Taeyong: When I’m recording [in English], it’s very fun but it’s like English studying, a little bit. It’s because English pronunciation is important. I think our fans like our English songs a lot. They and our Korean songs are really good. They’re really dope. Really a bop.

Several songs, like “Better Days” and “Together at Home” seem inspired especially by the global corona pandemic. Why was it important to you to share these sorts of songs with listeners?

Mark: We structured the entire album to appropriately fit what’s going on in the world right now. So that’s why we thought of this entire message. “Together at Home” and “Better Days” are the songs that really represent that feature the most in a way. Taeyong and I actually wrote some of the lyrics for “Together at Home.” When we received the message of the song for us to get the inspiration, they were talking about how we can talk about the Beyond Live [concert platform] that we used. We could think of that as a way for us to get inspired so we can think of ways to write about ways we could reach our fans at this time. So we actually wrote stuff about that on the song. We really wanted to put that in there. That’s why if you see the lyrics, we’re talking about how we’re always indoors but still kind of connected in a virtual kind of way, however we can [be]. Stuff like that really fits what’s going on right now, so we hope the fans can relate.

Is there a song that any members feel particular fondness for?

All: “Wish You Were Here!” [Members sing.]

Mark: I guess we all like “Wish You Were Here” the most. [Laughs.]

Lucas: Yeah!

Mark: It’s so catchy. It’s easy to listen to and so catchy. That’s why I like it.

Kai: I like the chorus. It’s very bright so I can get uplifted by it. I think it suits the album a lot.

Taemin: It would be great to hear fans’ covers of that song. I think it’s a song people will want to cover, and it’d be cool to collab with someone on it as well.

You’ve been together as SuperM for a while now, but who surprised or impressed you while recording and preparing this album?

Mark: We’ve been together quite a while now and, more than discover an aspect we haven’t seen of each other before, it’s more like, "Wow." For example, I knew Baekhyun was good at singing, but like… It still surprises me to this day, if you know what I mean? There’s stuff like that. Something that I didn’t know was that Baekhyun is good at art.

Baekhyun: We were together, and when we were in LA living together, from the beginning [as SuperM]. As time passes, we feel more like family and I feel every one of us is growing more into our roles as individual members of the group.

Were there any memorable moments from the creation process of this album?

Baekhyun: We actually shot a reality show together. Obviously, the album production process itself is always memorable, but in addition to what we’ve always done – preparing for performances, practicing together, recording the songs, etc. – outside of that, we had a chance to be a part of these shows that will air soon. These shows were where we got to spend a lot more time together, and we could showcase our chemistry to our fans and viewers. Those memories were really fun because we got to travel and do stuff together.

Transportation and speed have been themes that carried throughout your songs and music videos, where you regularly are seen traveling in different types of vehicles, whether it’s space ships or helicopters. At a time when people aren’t able to travel, what do you feel this represents?

Kai: If you look at our past music videos there are motorcycles, there are tanks, there are a lot of cars, and I think that goes well with SuperM’s concept as a group. That’s why they were featured in our music videos and past songs. We can’t really travel right now because of the pandemic and everything that’s going on, but we hope that, just like these modes of transportation can take you somewhere, our music and this album can be a mode of transportation that takes you to a place of hope and takes you to that higher place where everyone can enjoy themselves and be happy.

What are your favorite lyrics on the album?

Mark: For me “Wish You Were Here”’s, “After all these years, I wish you were, wish you were here” is my favorite. Because the melody is really cool.

Taemin: In “So Long,” there’s a chorus where Mark sings “차가운 표정으로 맞이하는 절정 (An ending with the coldest face*)” I like that part. It’s really addictive, that part in particular.

Mark: I don’t know if he’s teasing me. [Laughs.]

You’re all part of different groups under SM, so what do you think makes Super One a distinctly SuperM album?

Taemin: If you listen to our first mini album, there were songs that were like unit tracks. It wasn’t every member on the album on every track. This album is different because every member participated in all of the tracks, and I think that it’s distinctly SuperM just because we were kind of able to create this album with one unified messaging. There’s so many types of songs, types of genre, on the album, but I think we tried really hard to unify the messaging through the lyrics and through that bring a message of hope and unity to our fans and everyone who listens to it. I think that makes it distinctly SuperM.

What are your goals for the rest of 2020? What do you hope to achieve with this album?

Lucas: The biggest goal that we want is we really want to be able to meet our fans if possible in 2020, because we miss them so much. If that can’t happen, another goal that we have is that through the Super One album we bring a lot of strength and hope to anyone who listens to it.

Ten: We might have more online events, like Vlive [livestreams] or Beyond Live [concerts]. Maybe those kinds of things can happen. We’re still thinking of ways to get close to fans even though everything is far apart nowadays. We’re going to find all our fans. So don’t be sad, don’t worry, just have fun. Hope you guys stay strong during this period. We’re going to do our best to meet you guys.

Baekhyun: That’s right.

*Translation provided by SM Entertainment.

Tamar Herman @ GRAMMYs

160. porky’s duck hunt (1937)

release date: april 17th, 1937

series: looney tunes

director: tex avery

starring: mel blanc (porky, daffy), billy bletcher (drunken fish, the guy from upstairs), the sportsmen quartet (singing fish)

disney has steamboat willie. warner bros has porky’s duck hunt (or, actually porky’s hare hunt/a wild hare, your pick). the moment we’ve all been waiting for... the fated day is here at last: the world is introduced to the enigma that is daffy duck. if you somehow have been living under a rock for the past 6 months and don’t know, or if you’re just a well meaning passerby who i needlessly insulted for my own failed attempt at comical grandeur and for that i really am sorry, daffy’s my favorite looney tunes character (porky a close second) and one of my favorite cartoon characters of all time, if not favorite. i know my icon is pretty subtle in conveying that. anyway, yes! daffy makes his debut here, as does mel blanc voicing porky. with joe dougherty gone, mel has gotten his feet increasingly wet in cartoons, and now he has his big break, voicing the stuttering pig (and others) all the way until his death in 1989. and, as we saw in picador porky, porky is considerably slimmer here, a model which would be picked up by ub iwerks and bob clampett. frank tashlin would eventually slim porky down as well, the last one to do so.

while daffy is a tex avery creation, he only has 3 tex cartoons total. he’s unnamed in this cartoon (model sheets label him as “that crazy darn fool duck”), earning his title in his second entry, tex’s daffy duck and egghead. bob clampett would seemingly “adopt” daffy from tex, pinning him as porky’s sidekick. while clampett carried on tex’s vision of daffy’s daffiness, he also calmed him down as well. by 1938, daffy wasn’t a caricature of himself anymore. maybe not the most sane (is he ever?), but he was capable of coherent thought and conversation. in this cartoon, daffy is just a heckling little pest (though he fulfills that role quite often). porky and his dog rin chin chin embark on a good ol’ duck hunt, but daffy has other plans—saving his own skin.

the introduction of the cartoon is deceitfully mild. you go in thinking it’s just another porky pig cartoon, how cute, maybe a few polite laughs. a great way to lure the audience in for what’s ahead. the cartoon’s theme, “a hunting we will go”, scores the opening pan of duck hunting essentials: a book on how to hunt ducks, a “sure fire” shotgun, one “wear-well” hunting suit, duck decoys, and shotgun shells. some nice multi-plane camera work as we settle in on the happy hunter: a triumphant porky poses in front of his mirror, donning his hunting garb and shotgun, obviously pleased with himself, fancying himself as some sort of revolutionary soldier.

eager to get a move on, porky practices his aim, aiming straight at his napping dog (this time named rin-chin-chin. porky will have many a dog with many interesting names. i think “black fury” is my favorite for how metal it sounds.) the terrified pooch wakes from his nap and yelps, seeking refuge in a cabinet. carl stalling’s musical touch accents the anxious blinks of the dog very nicely.

finally, we hear mel blanc’s first ever lines for porky as he laughs it off. mel’s stuttering is especially profuse in this cartoon, still testing the waters with his new character. “d-d-d-d-d-do-do-don-do-don’t worry, it’s n-n-n--ne-ne-n-no-n-no-not l-l-l-lo-loaded. eh-w-we-w-watch!” 

and, because porky says it’s not loaded, the gun is absolutely loaded. he fires a big, gaping hole right in his ceiling. i love the slow, creeping realization that porky has as he finally registers what just happened. lots of gears turning in his head, some great acting. maybe this is just the Mel Blanc Effect, but porky seems to have the most personality in this cartoon yet. this scene also blew my mind when i first watched it: this was one of the first porky cartoons i checked out, maybe the second one after porky’s romance. i’m not too sure how i stumbled upon it (i think i was curious about daffy’s origins or something), but the musical timing just astounded me. there are 8 beats in the music, and 8 angry knocks on the door in conjunction with the music. succinct musical timing was still pretty foreign to me, and this scene REALLY heightened my appreciation for the 30s cartoons, especially the music. the music is such a pivotal factor in my enjoyment of these cartoons, and carl stalling is in top shape with this one. 

chuck jones animates the next scene as porky asks “who’s there?” billy bletcher’s grow grovels behind the door. “it’s the guy from upstairs!” ever good natured, porky opens the door, receiving a big fat punch to the face. the payoff is great as we see the peeved neighbor turn around, a giant hole in the right buttcheek of his pants, revealing his underwear beneath. great, drawn out timing.

tex deceives us with his tranquility of the early morning as we approach the fated duck pond, a sweeping, beautifully painted pan of the surroundings, accented by “william tell overture”. hang onto the peace and quiet, because it’s about to dissipate. porky shushes his dog, uttering the future wisdom of elmer fudd (but with a different speech impediment) as he whispers “shhh... shhhh! b-be-buh-be quiet. buh-be v-ve-very, v-v-ve-v-ve-very, v-v-v-v-ve-ve-very, ca-ca-ca-c-ca-ca-c-q-qu-qu-quiet.”

right on cue, porky’s prayers are answered as the telltale quack of a duck rings from above. one of my favorite gags of tex’s, relying wholeheartedly on deceitful timing as the duck floats on ahead. porky aims his gun, alone with only his dog, his target, and his thoughts... 

when suddenly, an explosive cacophony of noise cracks through the entire pond as a gaggle of hunters pop up from their respective hiding places, firing mercilessly at the duck. so mercilessly, in fact, that porky has to dive to the ground to save himself. perhaps even better than the sudden eruption of action is the peace that comes after it: the duck flies along out of the gun smoke, completely unscathed. the hunters yell “AW, SHUCKS!” in conjunction with the mocking underscore of a hunting we will go. to quote daffy, very ingenious! 

an appropriate score of “i only have eyes for you” as we hone in on a dim-witted cross eyed hunter (in the same vein as the cross eyed hitchhiker in porky the wrestler), who spots the duck in the air. the hunter aims his double barrel shotgun, but because he’s doomed to a life of loony hi-jinks thanks to his character design, he misses with both shots from each barrel, or so we think. tex takes quite a drastic turn out of left field as we see that the hunter HAS struck a target: two of them. two planes spiral towards the ground in black smoke, their pilots jumping out with the aid of their parachutes. a nonsensical gag that has little to do with the plot, but is hilariously unprecedented. 

more chuck jones animation as we spot our chipper hunter placing his duck decoys in the water. with that, we are met with stardom, folks. porky turns away, just in time for daffy to fly down and land among the decoys, unidentifiable. half of daffy’s dialogue is limited to quacks and duck noises in this cartoon, which makes it all the more entertaining in my opinion. it’s so funny seeing daffy act like an actual duck. out of all the prototypes of say porky (if there is a porky prototype... i guess the entire dougherty era?) and bugs, daffy acts the most like his assigned animal species out of any of them. daffy quacks, causing porky to turn around. all he sees is a sea of decoys. porky reaches for his gun, another quack. yet the decoys are still there, no duck in (presumed) sight. a befuddled porky scratches his head before hatching an idea, winking at the audience in reassurance. 

to hunt the duck, you must become the duck. carl stalling’s music score is lovely, nice and quaint and homely as porky ties a duck decoy around his head. he slowly submerges himself into the water, creeping across the pond, gun in hand. on the surface, it just looks like a regular, unblinking, plastic duck swimming. in all my viewings of this cartoon, i only JUST caught the trash littering the floor of the pond: what a great detail! it certainly adds a nice dose of sardonic humor. 

porky’s genius plan works in his favor as he slowly rises in front of daffy, effectively startling the duck as he points his rifle. daffy prepares for his fate, or lack thereof, shutting his eyes and closing his ears, but all that’s expelled out of the gun is a gush of water. while porky investigates his gun, daffy uses this as an opportunity to fly away, perching himself on top of a floating alcohol barrel a ways away from the potential crime scene. just as he thinks he’s outsmarted the idiot pig, a gunshot to the barrel below him proves daffy wrong. daffy flies into the air in an angry quacking fit, while we have some rather sloppy animation of the exposed alcohol spilling into the lake, the barrel sinking.

and, because why else? a few fish come across the alcohol. they swim into the barrel sober, and emerge hiccuping and inebriated. did you know that if a fish gets drunk, it can breathe and walk on land? a fitting, tipsy accompaniment of “when my dreamboat comes home” scores the fish giggling and helping each other into a spare rowboat lying on shore. 

then comes a beautiful, drunken rendition of “on moonlight bay” sung by the drunken fish. the song would be used in many a looney tunes cartoon, whether it be underscores or full on song numbers (while he doesn’t sing here, daffy does sing a duet with porky of the song in chuck jones’ my favorite duck. seemingly sober, of course). billy bletcher voices the lone fish slurring “now don’t you ever go away!”, the fish staring right at the camera in the same manner as the drunks from picador porky. i believe this is also chuck jones animation. it checks out his rule of animating drunks and closeups! the song is just lovely, as is the banjo accompaniment. certainly worthy of a listen. 

what other way to top off such a great moment than a ben hardaway level pun of porky muttering “there’s something fishy about that.” i digress, i enjoy the pun (i love my puns) and his animation is super appealing and cute. porky’s frustration melts as he hears the all too familiar call of a duck. cautiously does he pull apart the reeds that blocks him and his duck foe, attempting to get a good look...

and daffy retaliates by biting porky square in the snout. the daffy nose bite gag would be a running gag with him, long after the tex avery daffy days. what’s not to love? porky doesn’t appreciate the gag nearly as much as i do. instead, he reaches for his rifle, fires, and actually gets a shot in. daffy’s lifeless body flops into the water. oh joy, oh rapture! porky’s hard work has finally paid off.

porky is completely overjoyed, now an excited, stuttering mess. “i ge-ge-ge-gu-guh-guh-got ‘im! i ge-ge-ge-gu-guh-guh-got ‘im! eh-g-g-go-go ge-get the-the-the duck, rin-ch-chin-chin!” bobe cannon animates this great bait and switch of a gag as the dog dives into the water, tackling daffy’s body and swimming back underwater, now just a black blob. we finally think that porky has emerged victoriously, the music crescendoing in triumphant anticipation, when DAFFY emerges from the water, haughtily tossing the unconscious body of the dog on the shore in a huff. what a great gag! and a side note: i didn’t mention it before, but this is bobe cannon’s first animation credit. he’s a WONDERFUL animator who’d work for bob clampett and later chuck jones, responsible for so many great smears in the dover boys. however, he wasn’t too proud of his past. he got in full swing with the UPA craze, and because of its heavy focus on design, he viewed his past works at warner bros as inferior. his animation is terrific! one of his trademarks, at least in the B&W clampett cartoons, is having a character talk without animating the lipsync. you’ll notice this often with daffy especially, like in this scene here. a wonderful animator is he! 

speaking of bob(e)s, bob clampett animates the next iconic scene that would shape the entirety of daffy’s character for decades to come. in perhaps one of the strongest fourth wall breaks yet to come from a looney tunes cartoon, porky pulls out a script from the recesses of his hunting suit and flips through it calculatingly. finally, he just lets the talking get to the bottom of the conundrum. “hey, that wasn’t in the script!” daffy laughs in a lispless, hayseed guffaw. his first words are “don’t let it worry ya, skipper. i’m just a crazy, darn fool duck!” and, with that, daffy makes his iconic exit, HOOHOO!ing into the horizon as he does his signature stan laurel hop and hugh herbert laugh, cartwheeling and ankle clicking and bounding into the horizon.

on animating this scene, clampett says: “tex told me, ‘make him exit funny.’ i asked, ‘can i do anything i want?’ and he said ‘yes—anything.’ so i had daffy cross his eyes, do a stan laurel jump, and then do cartwheels, and do a ballet pirouette, and bounce on his head, and so forth. now, at that time, audiences weren't accustomed to seeing a cartoon character do these things. and so, when it hit the theaters it was like an explosion. people would leave the theaters talking about this daffy duck.” well, he was certainly right about the scene making an impact: here we are dissecting it today! while daffy’s personality turned in favor of the greedy, miserly type chuck jones and friz freleng gave him in the 50s, bob mckimson would still occasionally cling to daffy’s HOOHOO! exits and ways, even into the 60s. quite the important scene!

the scene after is rather meaningless and random, inserted possibly to fill up time or just as a declaration for tex’s love of gags, yet it amuses me nonetheless. tex works his sign gag magic as we spot a long, stringy fish making its way through the pond, an offscreen hand holding a sign that reads THIS IS AN ELECTRIC EEL, FOLKS. confirming our suspicions, the eel jolts with electricity, turning into a literal lightning bolt, a physical metaphor for its deadly touch. daffy spots the eel, completely unaware of its caveat. the animation and acting for daffy is very nice—the way he hides behind a log to “sneak” up on it, peering his little head out to get a good look. the duck strikes, swallowing the eel in one big gulp, swallowing and gleaming at the camera with his best “ain’t i a stinker?” grin. as he carries on his duck duties, swimming away contentedly, he receives a startling jolt of electricity from the eel inside him. the gag itself is a homage to the same gag in tex’s porky the rain-maker. once calm and content, daffy now skitters across the pond in a fit of terrified quacking, receiving jolts of electricity all the way. the gag has no relevance to the plot really—it just fades out and that’s the end of it, but i enjoy it regardless.

elsewhere, a different plight on a different character: hunger. porky sits in his boat, rifle in hand, waiting for his next fateful visitor to fly across, but the giant sandwich perched next to him is all too tantalizing. he licks his lips in anticipation—surely a quick lunch break can’t hurt if nobody’s coming to be shot, right? interesting to note that the past two cartoons to feature porky as a glutton have been tex avery cartoons—gold diggers of ‘49 and the blow out.

unable to stand it, porky reaches for his sandwich, discarding his rifle for the time being. just as he reaches for his lunch, a gaggle of ducks land right on the boat, quacking at him mockingly. the animation of porky scrambling to reach his gun is great. he doesn’t just reach for it, he swats around aimlessly for a few beats, trying to collect himself. i love how he looks in this cartoon, too. very cute and very appealing. porky finally grabs the gun, preparing to shoot, but all the ducks have flown away. oh well. porky goes back to his lunch, and his visitors fly back down again. in the midst of his scramble, porky grabs the gun the wrong way, nearly killing himself as he shoots the rowboat instead, collapsing into the water. all hopes of a delicious sandwich lunch is gone.

no matter! a random caricature of comedian joe penner is hiding in the pond to bring solace to porky, holding out a duck and giving his garbled catchphrase of “you wanna buy a duck?” something tells me that porky isn’t too enthused.

fade out and in to porky’s trusting hunting dog rin-chin-chin signaling for his master to come over quietly. porky marches out of the pond, swapping his duck decoy for his hunting cap and seeing what the matter is. i’m wondering if this scene was swapped around last minute, or maybe to indicate the passing of time (and more failures), seeing as porky didn’t have his duck decoy hat on in the last scene. nevertheless, magically changing hats aren’t on the top of porky’s mind: daffy swimming tantalizingly right in front of him is.

porky prepares to fire, and daffy once more anticipates his doom... but all he receives is a series of malfunctioning clicks. today is not porky’s day. however, daffy is pleased. so pleased that he marches onshore to HELP a very irate porky, furiously clicking his gun to no avail. i love how porky looks in this scene. very cute. daffy shakes his head and tuts in disapproval. in a great moment of half baked camaraderie, daffy haughtily reaches his hands out, signaling for porky to give him the gun. porky obliges hesitantly, observing as daffy clicks the gun once and fires. a success. daffy’s expression of disapproving indifference is the cherry on top of the entire gag.

with the duty done, daffy returns the gun to porky, who scratches his head in befuddlement. and, as if we could possibly forget, daffy guffaws his short lived catchphrase: “huh-huh, it’s me again.” the timing is lovely: avery could have opted to make daffy preface the interaction by saying “it’s me again”, but waited until the last possible moment to let the absurdity sit on. the line serves as a segue for daffy to make his heel clicking exit in a chorus of HOOHOO!s, once more bounding away from porky.

porky’s determined to get that damn duck if it’s the last thing he does. while daffy flies off, porky fires rapidly. in a homage to the previous airplane gag where the pilots were shot down, porky fires so quickly that he ends up decimating the ground beneath him, digging himself into a physical (and metaphorical) hole with each shot. a few overhead quacks, and porky pulls himself up from his homemade trench.

the V of ducks (or geese?) floating so tantalizingly above porky is like pure gold. figuring his gun wouldn’t be much use as of right now, porky opts to use a duck call instead. he gives it a hearty blow. the duck call is certainly convincing, but hardly in the way porky wanted it to be. the reeds and marshland around him is shot to pieces, the crowd of hunters from earlier mistaking porky for a duck instead. porky shields himself as the fire eventually stops. his happy-go-lucky attitude from the exposition is completely gone now as we spot a rare (for this time, anyway) display of over-boiling emotions. beyond frustrated, porky slams the duck call to the ground in defiance. physics defies his defying, and the duck call bounces right into his dog’s throat.

rin-chin-chin hiccups, and a duck call is emitted instead. porky and his dog ogle at each other, fearing what this could possibly mean. without any more hesitation, they both flop to the ground, taking cover. surprisingly, gunshots are sparse. that doesn’t stop porky from fashioning his own white flag to indicate his surrender. and, in an act of averyism, the gunshots pour in once porky raises his white flag. the animation of porky flopping around helplessly is very nice and rubbery—he’s like a rag doll.

duck season is completely out of the question: it’s pig season now. porky and rin-chin-chin run for the (beautifully painted) rural hills, both trying to dodge the flurry of bullets that follow. it’s like a war zone! finally, they both make it out alive... but miserable in the process. they both sulk as the woefully trudge back home, porky shooting furious glares at his hiccuping/quacking dog, who stares back at him in remorse. the mood is drastically different from the one we saw at the beginning.

finally, porky is in the comfort of his own home, free to mope and sulk as much as he pleases. just as he’s about to get his wallowing on, a cruelly familiar noise sounds out the window. seeing as it was the last cartoon released, it’s only fitting for “she was an acrobat’s daughter” to underscore the gang of ducks outside porky’s house, mockingly frolicking and playing, just waiting to be pierced full of holes.

we get our first porky stutter switch gag as he repeatedly attempts to fire, but to no avail. he’s pissed now. “d-duh-d-d-duh-du-duh-doggone it! nuh-nuh-nn-n-no more bu-buh-buh-b-bu-bu-bul-bull-bulle-buh—eh-shells!” but, as they say, luck favors the prepared, and porky was certainly prepared in the beginning. bad luck strikes porky once more as he tosses his gun away in a huff. in fact, there WAS at least one more bu-buh-b-buh-bul-bulle—shell in the gun. the gun fires, creating a giant hole in porky’s ceiling, parallel to the beginning.

a continuity error all in the name of a gag as we hear angry pounding on the door. porky opens the door and gets another punch to the snout from the same guy before, now marching upstairs with TWO holes in the back of his pants. a funny gag for sure, but the fact that he’s marching upstairs when just previously we saw the outside of porky’s house, ducks flying in his yard, raises a bit of a question. iris out.

but that’s not all, folks! the end of this cartoon has a special visitor: instead of the script writing “that’s all, folks!”, we instead have daffy zooming and zipping around on the lettering, HOOHOO!ing all the way, waving goodbye at his audience.

if you somehow managed to get to the end of this, congrats! what a monumental cartoon. this is not, by any means, the best daffy cartoon ever to exist. it’s a bit rough in some spots, and after the novelty wears off it isn’t as extraordinarily hilarious as it would have been in 1937. but that’s not to say this isn’t one of my favorite cartoons of all time: it absolutely is, despite its flaws. i love this cartoon to death. there’s so much happening! daffy’s first appearance, mel’s first time as porky. so anti-disney of an approach that it would truly shape the rest of the cartoons we’ll be seeing. without this cartoon, who knows if we’d have porky’s hare hunt? and without porky’s hare hunt, who knows if we’d have a wild hare? bugs owes daffy a thank you for his existence. i think this really is one of the most important cartoons in the entirety of looney tunes, moreso than a wild hare. the chances of a wild hare existing without porky’s duck hunt is pretty slim. tex would have no wabbit to rechristen and shape into the bugs we know and love today, because chances are there wouldn’t be a prototype bugs. not that porky hunting cartoons are the end all be all of animation, but they did play a part in spawning some of the most iconic characters in animation history.

as wild as this cartoon is, it’s strangely comforting at the same time. carl stalling’s musical score is out of this world on this one. the wild, zany moments are much more exciting than the exposition, but the exposition is very endearing and perhaps even a little sentimental, at least in my eyes. and, fun fact, there was actually a picture book adaptation made from this cartoon, so i suppose that adds to my view of its sentimentality. it feels like one, big, twisted norman rockwell painting to me. i’m always put in a good mood when watching this cartoon, because i don’t care about the continuity errors or animation errors or what have you. it’s just plain FUN. and again, you have to put yourself in the mindset of a 1937 moviegoer. this cartoon may seem like nothing in comparison to the mayhem we’ve seen in future cartoons, but as of april 17th, 1937, it was an absolute game changer. people had never seen this before. so, thanks to the direction of tex, this cartoon has shaped what looney tunes is today. i love this cartoon, and i’d urge you to watch it anytime, but its historical significance is another pivotal reason why you should watch it, at least once. GO WATCH IT!!!! watch history unfold before your very eyes! you have no reason not to. go do it!!

link!

Blackened progressive metal band Vintersea unveils an epic cinematic music video for their track ‘Crack Of Light’ taken from their 2019 album Illuminated. Enjoy it below. “Since the release of our newest album, Illuminated, our fans have been asking us about a music video for the central epic of the album, ‘Crack of Light’”, says guitarist Riley Nix. “We’ve secretly been toiling away on it for nearly a year now, building sets, costumes, and prop pieces on a scale we’ve never attempted before. We traveled to every corner of our state to capture unique and appropriate scenery for this song, which is a collective band favorite. We are so excited to share the results, which represent hard work and dedication by not only our band, but also by a ton of our friends and family who put their blood, sweat, and tears into this video.” ‘Crack of Light’ was an unbelievably ambitious project for the band, evident by the props and sets that show up on-camera. The band and their friends built a 20-foot boat specifically for this video, and the boat itself took four people to load it into a flatbed trailer for the band’s journey to location shooting in the Alvord Desert in rural Oregon. Additional shooting was done in a secluded cave with a natural sunlight shaft that only shows two hours of sunlight per day, and a set that was built by the band to resemble “The Void” from the Netflix series Stranger Things, including a 40×40-foot pool for the boat to float in for one segment of the video. “While we want every video to be special, the pandemic gave us more time to work on the music video for ‘Crack of Light’”, says bassist and videographer Karl Whinnery. “I had big dreams for ‘Crack of Light’ – the song has an oceanic vibe but everyone knows filming in the ocean is horrible. Still, the song screamed for a boat so I dug deep in my brain and came back with a pretty crazy idea. I managed to sell it to the band and we developed the idea. The crazy idea? Build a boat and take it to the desert.” [via Metal Goddesses]

French/Norwegian symphonic gothic metal act Sirenia presents the second single off of their upcoming studio album Riddles, Ruins & Revelations. Listen to ‘We Come To Ruins’ below. After releasing the album’s first output, ‘Addiction No. 1′, in late 2020, the four-piece around mastermind, bandleader, multi-instrumentalist, composer, songwriter and producer Morten Veland is ringing in the new year with another catchy yet smashing anthem. ‘We Come To Ruins’ skillfully portrays Sirenia’s multifaceted nature and adds harshness to the record’s characteristic elements, while transforming the “beauty and the beast“-concept into a modern yet dark atmosphere. Stamping guitar tunes are underlined by evil growls, ushered along by the vocal power of singer Emmanuelle Zoldan shortly after. This song is poised to move all the headbangers out there!Morten Veland about ‘We Come To Ruins’: “‘We Come To Ruins’ is the second single from our upcoming album. This song shows Sirenia from a heavier side, although it is a very dynamic song with many changes in both atmosphere and intensity. It is probably a more “typical” Sirenia song than our first single, but still with a modern approach.” [via Metal Goddesses]

Finnish melodic death metal act Evil Drive presents new single ‘Rising From The Revenge’. It comes with a music video which is available below. The band’s upcoming album Demons Within is due out April 2. Says the band: “Choosing the first video from such strong album was difficult this time. ‘Rising From The Revenge’ was chosen because it reflects the overall heaviness, melody and technicality of the new album.”

Swiss progressive trio Cellar Darling unveils new 11-minute piece ‘Dance’. Listen below. With ‘Dance,’ Cellar Darling have created a song that takes up the “Death and the Maiden” theme of their 2019 concept album The Spell, but at the same time adapts it into the here and now: a “dance of death”, an end-time vision. In this epic 11-minute track, the Swiss heavy progressive rock trio takes the listener on a dark musical journey worthy of the band’s name, combining mystical folk elements with heavy riffs and intricate structures. Once again, the highly unusual instrumentation typical for the band, including a hurdy-gurdy, flute, and piano, colours their signature sound. Inspired by the dancing plague of 1518, their lyrics for the first time do not tell of an exclusively fictional world but represent an examination of both our history and current events. Thus, Cellar Darling continue to move in a new direction, resuming the radical path they have chosen since departing from Eluveitie in 2016. [via Metal Goddesses]

Melodic post-hardcore sextet As Everything Unfolds have released their new single ‘Wallow’. Listen to it below. The track is the fourth single taken from the band’s upcoming debut album Within Each Lies The Other, which is set for a March 26 release via Long Branch Records. Vocalist Charlie Rolfe about the new single: “Anger and sadness really drove this track lyrically, and there’s a lot of frustration that’s presented through the use of primarily harsh vocals. It’s a song about betrayal, liars, and anyone who has ever done anything to you to make you deliberately feel worthless. There’s a lot of energy that was released through this song, and we invite you to do the same.”[via Metal Goddesses]

(We Are) Pigs is a new project spearheaded by South African-born producer and singer Esjay Jones. After debuting with a cover of Slipknot’s ‘Duality’ this past summer, she has unleashed an original song ‘Pulse Queen’, along with a music video. Combining elements of nu metal, alt-metal, and even trap music, (We Are) Pigs is hard to pin down as far as genre. ‘Pulse Queen’ offers Deftones-inspired vocals in the verses, with all-out screams in the chorus. “I’ve always had a deep love for the nu metal era … honestly, it’s still my favorite time for music sonically,” says Jones of her influences. Regarding the song ‘Pulse Queen’, Jones tells us, “We Are PIGS and the song ‘Pulse Queen’ was born out of the ashes of sitting idly by for years while industry executives told their artists how they should sing, look and sound. It’s a sort-of cleansing or purging of those feelings in hopes that I could redeem myself for being part of what I knew was a problem in the industry for so long, but not speaking up out of fear of retribution.” She adds, “The video captures the uncontrollable feeling of being forced to be something you are not just to fit the mold — having to put on a ‘mask’ to hide who you really are.  These songs are raw, they sit right with me, and not because some person with ‘A&R’ on their business card said so, but because I know it in my gut.” [via Consequence of Sound]

Which version of Hadestown do you prefer?

Oof. I’ve wanted to discuss my thoughts on HADESTOWN forever but never got around to it... I guess there’s no better time than now. 

This musical has been through countless developments and changes over the years and I’m happy to say I’ve been following it since the very beginning, way back when it was still just a concept album and hardly anyone knew about it. It was my go to album to pop on when I was feeling blue; it always relaxed me after a long stressful day. So I was super excited when I heard it was going to be staged and ever since the smashing NYTW production, I’ve been eagerly waiting for it to sweep the Great White Way. Then it finally did. So I was beyond ecstatic. 

That being said, I’m going to mainly focus my discussion on the Broadway version and the NYTW version, since there’s already been really great detailed posts about the other versions (you can search through my #Hadestown tag if interested; I’ve reblogged almost every thing related to the show since it’s been my obsession over the past few years). 

Ahem. So both versions have their pros and cons. I know the fandom is pretty divided between both these versions... I even know some people who aren’t fond at all of the Broadway version and only prefer the NYTW version and that’s fine (there does seem to be bias for this version in particular). I honestly like both. I’ll admit it took me some time to get used to the Broadway version. When shows transfer to Broadway, it’s inevitable that they’d undergo necessary changes.Some are good and some are bad (I’ve experienced this with all my favorite musicals... Amelie and SpongeBob just to name a few. Some of the changes I like and some things I prefer from their pre-Broadway out of town tryout versions). You can’t please everyone. These shows have large creative teams who go through lengthy processes to determine what suits the Broadway version best, so there’s always a reason for these changes. 

First let’s talk about the costumes. At first I wasn’t thrilled with the costumes in the Broadway version. If anyone remembers, I reblogged the first production photos with disdain in the tags. I thought the new costumes sucked all the color out of the NYTW costumes, replacing them with drab, dreary, ugly garments, though I did praise their historical accuracy (I think the Fates were the only costumes I actually could get behind... unlike the NYTW version, they actually ARE all dressed alike as the lyrics suggest... they remind me of a girl group... like the Carter Sisters). I was initially the most upset with Persephone’s black dress. But little did I know at the time that the black dress was not the dress she was going to wear for the WHOLE show-- they had yet to release the pictures of her in the green dress we all know and love from ‘’Livin’ it On Top’’ (a new and improved version of the one she wore in the NYTW production). Once I understood the very symbolic transformation her character goes through-- it made complete and total sense to me that they would bestow upon her a black dress while she joins her husband in the underworld. Now I really like the black dress! It looks like she’s going to a funeral, and that’s probably the whole point. I also didn’t initially care for Eurydice’s updated look. Everyone loved her little yellow skirt and off the shoulder top from the NYTW production. I love it too and it fits her... but now I really like Eurydice’s tomboyish look in the Broadway version. Not only does it fit the story, but it much better suits her updated character, not to mention it really ties into the whole Depression-Era setting. The thing about costume design is that it’s not always trying to create the cutest clothes or the most colorful and flamboyant for that matter. THEY NEED TO FIT THE STORY YOU’RE TRYING TO TELL. They need to tell us something about the characters, the setting and themes. What statement do these clothes make? After comparing the two versions, I have to say that the Broadway costumes fit the story much more than the NYTW costumes. Sure, the NYTW costumes are much more vibrant and pretty and I will always have a soft spot for them... and they do tie into the whole ‘’folksy’’ aesthetic they were going for, but there’s nothing in these costumes that makes me think of a 1930s-inspired post-apocalyptic  setting that Anais Mitchell wanted to convey. The costumes in the NYTW version are very hip, upbeat and modern, and they clearly weren’t aiming for historical accuracy, but with the way the music sounds (esp. if you consider the concept album), I feel like a more period approach was appropriate. Anyway, I like both costumes, and they both work well in their respective treatments of the same story, but the Broadway costumes have grown on me, and I’m glad they changed them. 

Now for the music. I love both, and I tend to listen to all three albums in a row (the concept album, the live album from the NYTW, and the original Broadway cast album). They all have their numerous differences, but the score remains relatively the same, or at least it evokes the same idea, the same sound, the same experience. I do like some of the new arrangements in the Broadway version (’’Wait for Me’’ benefited from this the most). But there are admittedly some lyrics I prefer from the NYTW version. The first ‘’Chant’’ for example. But I still like both of them honestly. 

I also like both casts. Fight me. I do much prefer  Damon Daunno ‘s version of ‘’Epic III’’ over Reeve Carney’s, but you know what? That’s neither here nor there... both songs make me cry, every single time, no matter who sings it. 

I’ve rambled long enough but yeah to sum this up, I like both versions, I don’t really have a preferred favorite. 

Other Music documentary (2019- directed by Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller)  review by Dina Hornreich

“It is harder to put together than to take apart.” A plain and not-so simple comment coming from the former Other Music Record Store co-owners, Josh Madell and Chris Vanderloo, who are prominently featured in the film, as these words underscore a scene in which their crew is dismantling their once hallowed CD sales racks in preparation for the store’s reluctant closure. OM used to herald as a beacon of hope in NYC’s bustling offbeat East Village neighborhood, a cultural hub known as St. Marks Place – not far from New York University. (If you asked any New Yorker for directions, they would enthusiastically tell you to simply “get off at the stop for Astor Place Station from the #6 or #4 [subway] train: you will see the gigantic cube immediately after exiting the station...can’t miss it!”)

The OM store opened its doors in 1996, and officially closed in 2016. Twenty years is a very good run for any kind of establishment such as this one, especially in the Big Apple – a fact that was not taken lightly by the two makers of this film who each were an employee and a regular customer at the establishment themselves! And like the store itself: the film is an endeavor for music nerds by music nerds. (And, obviously, this Dagger Zine review is no different.)

For creatively inclined weirdos like us, OM was a place of refuge. It was a major meta-musical mecca that happened to take the form of a retail outlet which is a very bold endeavor to consider: an unusual existence as a cultural outlet that strove to challenge our knowledge, expand our awareness, and promote the discovery of completely unknown (even uncomfortable) expressions. This mentality was not conducive whatsoever to the slick sales-driven experience one might come to expect upon shopping for any traditional kind of consumable commodities. And we certainly did not receive that kind of treatment while shopping there anyway!

OM’s purpose was contrary to basic principles of economics because it was run by artistic types who believed in a much higher purpose behind what they were selling: it was a community focused approach. In doing so, they completely confounded the basic notion that we were purchasing mere commercial products to be unloaded for profit (like toothpaste). The store’s very existence was a subversive act of culture jamming in and of itself. This information in conjunction with a solid awareness of the cut-throat and risky nature involved with doing any kind of enterprising endeavors in NYC is extremely pertinent. (I was once told that any restaurant in NYC would be far more successful if it were in another location simply because the competition alone would be considerably less stiff.)

Instead, they were offering something very unusual to their customers by incorporating some kind of pseudo-quasi-intellectual discourse using extraordinarily inventively stylistic fusions and/or varied often inconceivable sonic experiments to create such astute, pithy, and massively passionate descriptions that would be entirely ineffective as a sales strategy to the less tolerant/picky shoppers at the overpowering Tower Records across the street. The store had a unique energy that was entirely its own manifestation. Bin categories had mysterious names such as: in, then, decadanse, etc. that baffled even the artists whose own work was often filed underneath them, as evidenced by the hesitant testimony provided by indie rock luminary Dean Wareham (of the bands Galaxie 500 and Luna). In fact, these idiosyncratically descriptive insider taxonomies were typically used as a rite of passage upon orienting new store employees to OM’s unique aesthetic.  

The delectably raw live in-store performance footage of more acquired tastes, but definitely well-loved by those “in the know,” included bands who simply could not have thrived in the same ways at more conventional outlets: The Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Rapture, etc. The most delightfully peculiar act might have been delivered by a performer named Gary Wilson whose legendary appearance began with him surreptitiously entering the store while beneath a blanket and then (from behind the scenes, presumably) covering himself in talcum powder prior to seizing the stage with unabashedly alarming flamboyance – with only the playful tunes that would we expect to appropriately match that indelible image so gloriously!

And that was precisely the point: they were unequivocally rebelling against more conventional music consumption habits by offering an entirely different kind of taste-making experience that was kind of less palatable overall – and, in doing so, they even helped launch the careers of some important figures: Vampire Weekend, Animal Collective, and Interpol. The description of the “consignment” process for emerging artists who managed to attain a place on their sanctified shelves seemed extraordinarily modest considering the scope and nature of the impact it offered. There was a lot of social currency behind the OM brand.

The inclusion of a parody skit starring Aziz Anzari and Andy Blitz (available here as well https://youtu.be/YN1mKiQbi4g), followed by the various customer testimonials (including actor and musician Jason Schwartzman), indicated that they may have exuded more than a hint of an unflatteringly, even off-putting, air of NYC hipster pretentiousness akin to that portrayed in the Nick Hornby book, Stephen Frears movie, and/or the new Hulu series (involving both Hornby and Frears): High Fidelity. However, there were clearly very good reasons for them to do this: They represented an extreme mishmash of strange characters who collectively embodied all the historically marginalized shapes, sizes, colors among other attributes that would not have been celebrated (or considered marketable) elsewhere. If they weren’t a little snooty, they probably would have been mocked entirely – as evidenced by an astute and pithy comment by a long-time store employee describing Animal Collective as appearing like a “sinister Fraggle Rock on acid.”

These artists never aspired to becoming real “rock stars” anyway – on the contrary, they embodied the antithesis of that concept. (A point made abundantly clear as they bookended the film with footage of ordinary musicians simply marching through the streets of NYC.) Literally, OM offered shelter to those of us who are able to truly appreciate the anthemic idea behind the phrase: “songs in the key of Z.” It was a place for gathering the outsiders among outsiders, in other words.

It is impossible to ignore various impressive personalities who made appearances throughout the film, in both large and small roles. This includes but is not limited to major NYC scene contributors such as Lizzy Goodman, author of the equally compelling and similarly themed book: Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock’n Roll in New York City 2001-2011. Footage in the film included key figures in influential bands including: TV on the Radio, Le Tigre, The National, Vampire Weekend, Yeah Yeah Yeahs (all of whom are also featured in Goodman’s book). You can also see glimpses of varied lesser known, yet supremely compelling figures of that era, including writers Kandia Krazy Horse and Geeta Dayal, and former store employees such as Lisa Garrett and Gerald Hammill.

These conversations take place until we eventually witness the demise of Tower across the street (and its many ilk of like-minded big box stores) which clearly signaled the ever-looming end for Vanderloo and Madell’s opus-like enterprise. A point that musician Stephin Merritt, best known for so many stellar masterpieces with his longest-running outfit, The Magnetic Fields, emphasizes upon casually observing the degrading presence of a fitness studio franchise that has since taken up residence in the spot that used to house Tower’s second floor. (I failed to try and restrain myself from recalling a new sense of irony from the lyrical lines that Merritt himself had written and recorded around 1991: “Why do we still live here.. In this repulsive town? All our friends are in New York.”)

There is also a bit of an underlying insinuation only apparent from random customer shots throughout the store regarding a possible impact from the Rough Trade Records shop that had recently opened in Brooklyn around the time of OM’s closing. This is exceedingly apparent to this biased writer herself who personally ventured out to that Williamsburg location last year for an in-store performance with NYU Punk Professor, Vivien Goldman, who had just published her own book Revenge of the She Punks. An event whose audience clearly included some members of the OM community featured in this film as I recall the store had heavily lauded her Resolutionary compilation album release prior to its official closing.

As the film successfully affirms the significance behind record store culture (especially in a global hub like NYC) which has long been hailed as a sacred gathering space for various misfits and weirdos who might find significantly less understanding and/or productive social outlets in other circumstances; its unavoidable bittersweet conclusion dramatically asserts how disappointing it is for us to witness the complete loss in their consistently tenuous financial viability as we are well into the digital information age – if not for the simple fact that paying for music (or any kind of intellectual property) is more commonly perceived as an anachronistic practice which is a clear and painful affront to all the prescient creative geniuses who are struggling to make an honest living off their work.

The film highlights the many multifaceted aspects that we fondly and endearingly associate with the appreciation of music that lies at the heart of the irrational fervor behind record collecting culture: the smell of the vinyl itself, the enormous visual impact around the artists’ choices for cover art, the substantial weight it possesses when we remove it from the sleeve, the delicacy necessary to handle vinyl so as to minimize any potential damage, its often very limited quantities as it is not cost-efficient to produce (the obscurity is intrinsically part of the exhilaration surrounding this “hunt”) among other substantial inconveniences that more or less confirm this as an unproductive – if not entirely illogical – endeavor overall!

Of course, it has always been very apparent to us that we were engaged in some insanely addictive bizarre kinds of quests that kept leading us to this absurd little locale in the first place – desperately trying to pacify some nebulous and insatiable deep cravings that we couldn’t always articulate… yet it always kept us coming back for more! As Mac McCaughan from the bands Superchunk and Portastic, as well as co-owner of Merge Records, astutely concludes: “They knew what you wanted before you knew.” (Of course, they did!)

The overarching and staunch message of this film is most apparent during the final closing scenes when we are eavesdropping on a conversation that the former co-owner, Josh Madell, is having with his young daughter about simply streaming the Hamilton Soundtrack on Spotify because the vinyl copy would have cost her $90 in the store. Perhaps even more ironic, of course, might be suggested by the very relevant context in which we find ourselves today: the annual Record Store Day celebratory event with which the film’s re-release was planned to coincide obviously could not happen. As a result, I was reluctantly watching it, albeit self-consciously, on my 13” laptop screen in my home office during the self-quarantine of COVID-19. Half the proceeds for the “tickets” were to be used to support one of my favorite local record shops here in Denver, CO, Twist and Shout, who may or may not be able to reopen as this pandemic situation evolves.

There are bigger questions to contemplate as the tide of change has only just begun in ways that only a tragedy, such as a worldwide pandemic, can facilitate for even the most obstinate luddites who have no choice but to incorporate regular use of digital formats in their daily habits – and we totally have, of course! This documentary remains as unequivocal evidence of the viability behind OM as it stood as an historic cultural hub that transcended the fundamental premise behind a commercial retail outlet. (Even though retail was once considered the only aspect of the industry where substantial money could be made. In fact, a measure of an artists’ success was often the number of albums they actually sold.) As its impact clearly exceeds its impressive years as a store-front operated business, it may also indicate a shortcoming in mainstream outlets who tend to ignore, silence, dismiss, and otherwise relegate the disempowered voices in our community – which, of course, are the major reasons that forced us to seek out these alternate forums in the first place.

The role of arts and culture for society is in fact to provide the very same opportunities that OM offered to us, which is (to reiterate that point from above) to provide an opportunity for discourse that challenges our knowledge, expands our awareness, and promotes the discovery of the completely unknown (even uncomfortable) expressions. These conversations give our lives meaning and force us to continually improve ourselves on many levels. While such commentaries could be considered an acquired taste or even an entirely esoteric endeavor, the crucial sensibilities they offer hold enormous potential for a world that honestly seems to need to hear from us… now more than ever!

If only we could find a better way to invite the integration of our perspectives into the bigger conversations? So that we can participate in the innovations for the changed world that will be waiting for us – and to ensure that it will be a more inclusive place for all of us. Which is perhaps what we ultimately (and so desperately) need, want, and deserve. The alternatives seem frighteningly Orwellian… at the risk of seeming a bit histrionic.

http://www.factorytwentyfive.com/other-music/?fbclid=IwAR3wtvtOKKC46YmfwjB6zv0wp5GMh4YBHFuWk0aLOti5m2NSs8PFChjrK4M

People tend to analyze Disneyland as a thematic treatment of America and American mythology - which is definitely an accurate reading - and the optimistic point of view is often characterized more as like a tone or even a flaw. But sitting here this morning listening to Put on your Sunday clothes (a song that plays on Main Street and about relentless aspiration) it’s occurring to me that perhaps even more than American mythology optimism itself IS the theme of Disneyland. It runs through every land and every attraction and is reflected back at us through various lenses (namely American, white, upper middle class lenses). In fact I think the general critique so often heard might be exactly backward: that the theme of Disneyland isn't about America with an overly optimistic lens it's about optimism with an overly American lens. And that its flaws (if they are to be considered flaws) come from that. Each land in the park reflects a distinct period of either history or culture where optimism and hope for a better tomorrow are at its zenith, at least from that lens. That IS the common thread. We enter Main Street USA right at the turn of the century - a period before the depression and before the World Wars where the marvels of technology are making life better on what seems a daily basis. Where steam trains carry us off onto exciting destinies, where everything is colorful and rosy, architecture is over the top, and people wear their Sunday best every day. People in this sleepy town coming into its own dream of the people they’ll be one day, the things they will achieve, the wondrous things that await them, and whadaya know at the far end of the street a shimmering castle beckons them forward towards their dreams - a symbol of things to come. At the hub a series of adventures await us - each a microcosm of the same story. In Adventureland a “untamed” jungle is awaiting man to conquer it, unveil it’s riches and/or unveil itself as the tropical paradise it was always meant to be. A similar story awaits in Frontierland where the promise of manifest destiny is new, gold awaits, and the horizon is limitless. In New Orleans Square it’s a party all the time and a reflection of the promise of the west, both a realization and one of the last stepping off points before the frontier. In Walt Disney World this theme is even better reflected as Liberty Square and revolutionary America is swapped in - another era in which fears and darkness are cast off in favor of a new vision of what a better tomorrow could look like. On the other side of the hub, a literal vision of tomorrow, Tomorrowland reflects what Main Street might look like in hundreds of years: technology has fulfilled it’s promise, no one wants for anything, the world and universe are at peace, convenience and leisure are everywhere, and all sorts of transportation are waiting to whisk you off to literally anywhere you please. And finally Fantasyland, usually the hardest land to fit into the “americana” interpretation, fits perhaps most with the optimistic and hopeful theme and is fittingly at the heart of the park. Here we see a land inhabited by characters with often terrible pasts, overcome them and achieve their dreams. Snow White and Dumbo overcome abuse and trauma. Peter Pan teaches children to fly, an archetypal metaphor, and hold onto their childhood.  Mr. Toad has crazy fun with friends, Pinocchio and Geppetto get their wish and overcome heartache and fear and loneliness. Alice escapes the doldrums of victorian life, etc, etc. And off in the back corner of the park, which I’m sure if it had been designed from day one, would have laid straight back from the castle: the end of the yellow brick road as it were,  lies a monument towards optimism, cooperation, and a better tomorrow again in the form of “it’s a small world.” It’s telling us that to achieve the dreams of the future it will take all of us uniting together. Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom therefore are really embodiments  of the Disney ethos of their time: a strong conviction that the world is an exciting amazing place and no matter how bad things might have been or look to you now, a great big beautiful tomorrow lies just a dream away. And notably, that it’s up to us as a whole to take us there. The lands not only celebrate optimism but human achievements in realizing that optimism  - whether it’s man conquering the jungle or frontier, the creation of a modern democracy, or characters escaping their haunting pasts. The park even tells us that death isn’t to be feared but enjoyed! (The haunted mansion). Perhaps it’s no surprise that these parks are more popular than ever before, given the world we find ourselves living in at the moment. The flaws in the park’s treatment then, aren’t the optimism itself, but rather the somewhat outdated, very white, very American, very classed stories it chooses to tell - particularly on the western side of the park (and perhaps with its historic coziness with monopolistic corporations as well) that were only optimistic and pleasant for the people who wrote the history. For the time they might have been appropriate given the audience they were designed for, but today some of the implications can make you a bit uneasy. I’d still hold that the bones are good, that those settings can still reflect themes of optimism while becoming more aware and inclusive, and indeed over time we’ve seen very slow changes to that affect. For example, Thunder Mountain - while initially perhaps a glorification of gold mining has over time with various story changes become more and more of a morality play about what happens to those who are reckless in their pursuit of profit - something a certain company might take a lesson from. I for one, as perhaps one of the more obvious examples,  would love to see what a Disneyland would look like with stories of the immigrant experience of the same time period paralleling those on Main Street. At any rate, like America, Disneyland is flawed, but it’s themes are solid. Optimism, hope for the future, and the responsibility to foster that future, are the themes that lie at the heart of the stories it tells and why people keep coming back.

P.S. This again reinforces the idea that I think Joe Rohde first articulated: that theme parks NEED themes in the literary sense to achieve their full potential and be effective: that that is what separates the good from the bad park executions, and Disneyland in particularly is a great example of what occurs when nearly every element of the experience serves to reinforce and drive home a particular message.

A couple of months ago, after finishing COUNTER/Weight, I spent about a week in a total hangover, relistening to scenes and having feelings. I took some notes, but procrastinated posting them, and then finally got distracted. But, a) I hate leaving things I intended for tumblr unposted, even if they have value only for me, and b) I also hate posting things out of order, and there's a big TM liveblog incoming. So, here's a bunch of really random thoughts about C/w from past me.

The gnosis virus did go nowhere huh. I was hopeful for a minute when one of the finale intros mentioned it, but that was it. What was the purpose of that arc even. [Note from present me: Lol. At least I feel better about this one!]

Oh, and the patch AuDy left never reappeared either. And the idea from the faction game that Aria's images owned by EarthHome/Petrichor transmit Rigour code… That's the flip side of the coin. On the one hand, it's really cool to see the creative process – on the other, it sometimes feels like you're listening to people write a script for the tv show, but only get to see a half of the finished product. It's fascinating to see the universe grow organically and the players to come up with new ideas and get excited about them – but that means numerous retcons, some of them not even presented as such, because the creators forgot what the previous revision was or didn't thought it was important. It's a unique feature of the medium that player choice directs the narrative and it's not bound by railroading – but that means some roads lead nowhere, and some branches dry and fall off.

It's a bit harder to make peace with something that could have easily been developed more within the existing plot of the show. How come there's a player character whose consciousness consists of three different people in various combinations, but nobody seems to be curious how that works? No PC or NPC ever asked “Which one of you is speaking right now?” or something. The final episodes made a lot of things clearer, but it still felt too little, too late. Hard not to be reminded of that gripe about certain two characters sharing one character sheet one of whom was left underdeveloped and half-forgotten… Both are very ambitious concepts that require a double amount of work from the player, so I feel bad complaining they weren't realized to full potential, but…

Speaking of L&D… I still want to know how the hell did that one engineer all by herself design 4 gods, one of which became a basis for technology that was advanced even for the civilizations 80,000 years later? This woman singlehandedly surpassed any technological achievement of humanity before and after. Who Is She

I saw a “Wake me up: before you go go / when september ends / wake me up inside” meme and thought “heh, this sounds relevant, which member of the Chime is which?” and it already made me sad, but then I realized that I'd never actually heard the september song and looked it up and. The lyrics fit so well. What the fuck. It's an old song everyone keeps joking about. Why is it appropriate for a legitimate fanmix. What. I guess the word “September” will never be the same again for me.

I looked up the rules for Firebrands, the game used for the finale. Oh my, challenges for the dance minigame are so overtly romantic when you see them in a list together! Imagine this cast of characters having to answer to “do you place your hand upon my elbow, shoulder, waist, or hip?” lmao. Also I didn't realize “May I?” was part of the rules for “stealing time together”. (And I found out there's a party version of that minigame with bug-themed challenges. I might have dug too deep…) "Tactical skirmish" is a really fascinating concept, I've never seen such a masochistic combat system! Really faces the player with the violence they're inflicting: sure, you can always fight on, but are you ready to live with what you'll have to do? But for it to work fully, you need a lot of non-expendable NPCs on both sides. The one with the most likeable team wins! (Like Mako did.)

I'm relistening to Three Conversations and it's pretty interesting that Ibex has a bunch perfectly lifelike android bodies, right? There is no such technology seen anywhere else. Did Righteousness develop and privatize that? Are they so complex that only a Divine would have enough computing power to successfully mimic organic life? Can Aria convince Righteousness to help her perform on stage without leaving her duties? Also, like with AuDy, I wonder how Ibex & Righteousness' consciousness works. Is it a single mind, spread across every body he has, or even anything Righteousness is running on, having a bunch of different conversations at once if he needs to? Or is the original Ibex just gone, and what's left is a personality imprint hanging on to the connection to his still living body, imitating his former self like the automated recording Cass saw wore his face? In other words, has Ibex completely fused with Righteousness, or assimilated and destroyed by it? Does he not exist anymore as an independent singular being, or does he not exist at all? Most info indicates the former, but there was also “You’re not in there anymore” “No”.

If Orth and Jace are anime fans with their Kingdom Come and Panther, then Ibex is the guy who's way too into dinosaurs or paleontology. It's as if the heads of various confessions were called Triceratops, Stegosaurus etc. and only one of them knows wtf that means, and also he compares his Divine to… Were there scavenging dinosaurs? I'm looking at an article that suggests T. Rex might have been a scavenger, so yeah he would compare Righteousness to a goddamn T. Rex.

Hey what do you think is the most thematically aproppriate part of the Hieron anime for Orth to watch alone at night during the Kingdom game. What's the best thematic parallel for when he turns off the episode and thinks he made a mistake. Do you think that he once, after a long day and a long month and maybe a long year of feeling helpless and doomed, sits down for a distraction but ends up sobbing “How could they let this happen to Mother Glory”

On Joypark, there are definitely statues of Eidolons, ancient and holy, that were repainted and repurposed as Hieron deities. Imagine a giant Greek or Roman style marble statue of Apote – and it’s painted over as Samot, with an anime face and in really bright plain colors like these “reconstructions of original coloring” that actually only use base colors so they look like cheap action figures.

I was reading Austin's top ten games of 2016 list on Waypoint and he gave first place to The Sprawl! Aww!

The Downloads folder in my phone gallery is funny bc it mostly consists of every freely available f@tt map and also that one photo of Tristan Walker (because I tried to redraw it, very unsuccessfully). I go check a map and every time am met by Ibex just. staring at me. It's unsettling

Some of the many options for how Apostolosian gender could have been presented:

Apostolosians prefer to be addressed by the most neutral available human pronoun, represented as "they" in English, because the human languages don't have anything close enough

Apostolosian pronouns are represented in English by a set of real-life common pronouns and neopronouns

There's a list of Apostolosian pronouns and they're just used in English verbatim (Really impractical because the players need a cheat sheet, but the most fair)

Humans apply human genders to Apostolosians. Apostolosians may be offended, may find it convenient, or something else

As Austin said in the post-mortem, the Eidolon system is not gender. It's represented in English by titles/honorifics/etc

Any of the above, and the creators are aware of the difference between personal pronouns, grammatical gender, and social gender

And that’s not even touching the core problem of what the concept of gender in a futuristic, techonologically advanced society would look like. Yes, I'm complaining about this for the third time but I'm just. So tired of native English speakers' takes on gendered language. They could have made Apostolosian gender look like anything and they made it look like that fucking mess... God, I really hope TM is good enough to make me forget and forgive the experience of listening to “he... sorry, they” for 100 hours. [Note from present me: Well… mostly]

Here’s my take on this: eidolons in Apostolosian language are absurdly broad noun classes with associated classifiers (which fits both the idea that they’re gender but not actually, and that each of them is a patron to several unrelated aspects of life) Apostolosian: the word “(Apo)thesa” is used to refer to people who follow the corresponding eidolon, as well as for counting buildings, heavy machinery, military units, specific strategies and tactics, log entries, historical documents and chronicles, history textbooks and monographs, and eras :) Human: what the fuck

Very critical, imaginative worldbuilding in which 80,000+ years into the future humanity somehow has 21st century gender and 21st century capitalism! TBH, I find any sci-fi set in the far future inherently silly – we can’t really imagine the future technogy and its effect on society. But it feels like C/w barely even tried, and to hear it boast about “critical worldbuilding” is kinda strange. I assumed that meant they build the world critically, not that they recreate modern society or some aspect of it and criticize that! It’s just another Star Trek then! And it was already clear right during the setup when they said “We don’t want Star Trek aliens” and immediately created Apostolosians.

I haven't seen a single piece of fanart with Taako and Mako. Come on, does nobody want to see these two next to each other! Especially considering the outfits artists like to put Taako in!

I really don't understand how and why people do fandom activities on Twitter and Discord where the creators also have accounts. It gives me so much secondhand embarrassment. I can barely peek at Twitter posts before running away. Old-fashioned opinion apparently but I strongly believe the main fandom space and the interaction-with-original-creators space should be separate. I need a space where I can voice my opinions, especially negative ones, with complete freedom. I need to be able to say exactly what's on my mind. But I wouldn't want any of the people on the podcast to read something unfiltered like my complaints above. Being in the same space as the source content creators obliges any decent person to be diplomatic and constructive. And the creators, in turn, need a space where they don't come across complete randos yelling at them about something they said in a podcast three years ago. I'm already feeling uncomfortable because hearing to strangers pour their hearts out for hundreds of hours gives me way too much insight on who they are as people. Of course, nothing’s stopping them from lurking on Tumblr or AO3 and even reading this very post, but a platform where they have official accounts is still a different thing! I even feel uncomfortable talking about the podcast creators using their first names so much. To my ear, referring to a total stranger by first name, especially if it's a shortened form, sounds so rude! I'm not their friend, I don't have that right! But, of course, writing something like “Mr Walker” in my liveblogs would have been even weirder, nobody does that...

Is it a common experience to not even think about fanfiction after listening to Hieron, but going straight to AO3 after C/w? I feel like since Hieron is still a work in progress, writing/reading about it is stepping on the GM&players' toes, and C/w is finished so it's like they gave us the keys to the playground, it's the fandom's turn now. This story has so much blanks and they must be filled! In one of the early episodes they joked that something cute they said would encourage people to ship Mako/Cass and I was like "Bold of you to assume they aren't already" and, indeed, I was right and it's the most popular C/w ship on AO3. Too bad I’m so indifferent to it…

It’s a shame we never had a full scene with Ariadne or even learned what they were up to during the finale.

I still don't understand how Ibex went from “evil CEO” to “leader of a proletarian revolution”, these sound like completely opposite concepts to me

I probably have talked about this too much and have pretty much given up on ever getting a clear picture due to all of these reimaginings but… Righteousness and Voice… Ibex takes Righteousness out of Mako but he still has Voice, that was pretty much openly stated, correct? So how does that work? I’m guessing Righteousness is hidden somewhere in Voice’s code. But if so:

Did Maryland know? On the one hand, she’s too competent not to. On the other, why would she ever allow or accept that?

How did Righteousness not get corrupted by Rigour too? Maybe it did, but broke off the connection with the rest of itself to contain the damage? Or maybe, on the contrary, it kept in contact and was sending intel to Ibex the whole time? But in that case he would have provided more help in the finale.

Epic Movie (Re)Watch #239 - The Muppet Movie

Spoilers Below

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes.

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: No.

Format: DVD

1) The prologue.

How this film opens - with an assortment of Muppet characters getting together for a private viewing of The Muppet Movie - does well to establish tone. It’s pretty much the filmmakers telling the audience, “You don’t need to take this too seriously, it’s just a fun movie.” It reintroduces us to The Muppets who we know but in a way where this could be someone’s first Muppet film and you understand the role of each character. Not only that, but Kermit’s response to Robin’s question of if this is how the Muppets actually met enhances the meta tone.

Kermit: “Well it’s sort of approximately how it happened.”

2) “Rainbow Connection”

“Rainbow Connection” might be up there with “It’s Not Easy Being Green” as the song most associated with The Muppets, and there’s a reason for it. The song is timeless, fitting in during any era (much like the characters themselves). It is a beautiful, optimistic, and imaginative song that not only sets up Kermit’s character well but the theme of the film. It has that daydreamer element that The Muppets are essentially founded on. If you haven’t heard it before I recommend taking a listen.

3) When I was young I had no idea who all these celebrities were or that they were celebrities. Now that I’m older I can notice them in what I call “Cameo Watch!” Like this first cameo. CAMEO WATCH: Dom Deluise

4) This film has an incredibly sharp wit to it shown through its dialogue, humor, and characters.

Dom Deluise: “I have lost my sense of direction.” Kermit: “Have you tried Harry Krishna?”

5) Kermit the Frog as a character.

Okay, let me just say, it feels really weird to talk about The Muppets as characters. Because it’s hard to think of them as characters being written. They’re The Muppets! They’re Kermit and Fozzie and Ms. Piggy and they just are themselves. This mere challenge speaks wonders to the consistency of writing and performance given by the Muppeteers. Kermit for example: Kermit is totally unselfish. His entire motivation for going to Hollywood isn’t fame/fortune on its own but the opportunity to make, “millions of people happy.” He’s a pretty down to earth, reasonable frog who tags along with a bunch of nut cases and does his best to reign in the insanity. He’s lovable, he’s sharp, he’s funny, he’s Kermit the Frog. I don’t know what else to say.

6) With the film’s budget Jim Henson wanted to really push the limitations of puppeteering. One of the most difficult effects (whose deceptively simple appearance speaks well to the talent of the filmmakers) is Kermit the Frog riding a bike. I don’t even know how they did that.

7) The El Sleazo Cafe is Kermit’s first stop on his road trip/odyssey of sorts. It’s an environment which A) he is not used to and B) kind of is his contrast. Yeah he’s from a dirty swamp but this is a different kind of dirty. This is mean people who like to fight, not Kermit. Seeing this frog out of water creates a nice energy to the scene and a first good stop on the film.

8) Cameo Watch: James Coburn, Madeline Kahn, Telly Salva, Carol Kane and Paul Williams all appear in the El Sleazo scene.

9) I feel like sometimes I’m Kermit.

Kermit [about Fozzie]: “This guy's lost.” Waiter: “Maybe he should try Hare Krishna.” Kermit: “Good grief, it’s a running gag.”

10) Fozzie Bear.

The Costello to Kermit’s Abbott, I struggle to talk about Fozzie in much the same way I did with Kermit. Because what is there to say? He’s a bit of a dork but a funny, good hearted/good natured one. He’s funny, his relationship with Kermit is one of the things that keeps the franchise going as strong as it does, I don’t know what else to say. He’s Fozzie Bear.

11) Something I will say it is a testament to these performers that each Muppet feels so naturally alive. You never look at any of them and think, “That’s a lifeless bit of felt.” Not only do the likes of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, and the other Muppeteers do well at creating an individual character but distinguishing characters. These performers are working as multiple characters in a production and while older audiences might recognize the similarities in voices you don’t look at Rowlf the Dog and think, “Yep, that’s Kermit,” or at Miss Piggy and think, “Yep, that’s Fozzie.” They’re legends and it’s no mystery why.

12) Doc Hopper is actually an excellent villain for The Muppets to face off against.

The reason Doc Hopper is so effective is because he’s the total antithesis of The Muppets. He’s a greedy, conniving, insincere, manipulative sellout of a man. His dreams don’t involve making people happy they involve making himself rich and anything he can’t have he’ll destroy. Henson and crew - despite the success of The Muppets - were never doing anything because of the mainstream appeal. They had a ton of bizarre, unique, and wonderful flops under their belts (see: Labyrinth). It’s almost like Doc Hopper represents mainstream showbiz wanting them to sellout and the journey is about staying true to your dream. I love that.

13) “Movin’ Right Along”

There’s not really a bad song in the film (although there is one I really just hate but that doesn’t mean it’s bad per say, more on that later). Although none are as praised as “Rainbow Connection”, “Movin’ Right Along” is an excellent second number. It has the same amount of hope and optimism to it that infects the film, with the idea of progress and moving forward at the heart of it. It’s a great buddy song for Kermit and Fozzie, with the same amount of wit and heart that the film prides itself on.

13.1) I’d be remised if I didn’t mention two of my favorite gags in the film. The fork in the road…

And a very special cameo.

14) Not that he cares, but wouldn’t Doc Hopper using Kermit’s likeness on a billboard without his permission illegal?

15) I’m a sucker for any movie that has a moment where a character reads the script for the movie.

16) “Can You Picture That?”

In my opinion, this could possibly be the most underrated song in the Muppets’ musical canon. It stands up well against “Movin’ Right Along” and “Rainbow Connection” with its energy and positivity. Basically it’s a song about challenging your imagine and even though the lyrics can feel nonsensical that’s sort of the point. It’s about thinking of things, picturing unique things that might not make sense. But just because something doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

17) And disguising the car worked for a grand total of 7 seconds.

Max [after being told to look out for a frog and a bear in a brown colored Studebaker]: “Gee Doc, all I see are a frog and a bear in a rainbow colored Studebaker.”

18) Gonzo the Great.

It is like each character you meet in this film is increasingly crazy. Kermit, then Fozzie, then Dr. Teeth and his band, and now the personification of Muppet weirdness times ten: Gonzo! Gonzo is fun, funny, insane, and just perfectly random enough to give the group an extra oomph. There’s a chance this weirdo might be my favorite Muppet character! Maybe, maybe not. It’s hard to pick a favorite.

(GIF originally posted by @nostalgicgifs)

19) Cameo Watch: Milton Berle.

20) Cameo Watch: Elliott Gould.

Okay, I thought I remembered all the cameos but I 100% forgot about Gould’s appearance. It actually made me jump.

21) Cameo Watch: Ed Bergen.

This scene was shot shortly before the legendary puppeteer’s death in 1978. His appearance in the movie held particular weight for Jim Henson, as Bergen and his wooden sidekick (Charlie McCarthy) influenced his interest in puppetry. The film is dedicated in Bergen’s memory.

22) I low-key love that Miss Piggy wins a beauty pageant and no one really bats an eye at it. Take that conventional standards of feminine beauty!

23) “Never Before, Never Again”

God I hate this song. I usually skip it. It’s just so awkward and uncomfortable for me to watch, but I think that’s the point. I think it’s supposed to be funny, Frank Oz singing this sweeping love ballad as Miss Piggy. And it taking itself seriously is part of the joke but it is part of that seriousness which makes me hate it. I actually wrote in my notes, “Wake me when it’s over.” I think it’s objectively a good song and good part of the film, I just flat out don’t like it. The one weak link for me in this excellent picture.

24) Wait, is Ms. Piggy meant to be the Yoko Ono of The Muppets in this movie?

25) Cameo Watch: Bob Hope and Richard Pryor both show up at the county fair.

26) The scene where The Muppets chase down Gonzo on his balloons is a fun bit of fast pacing “action” to add to the film. It’s hard for a Muppet movie to have non-musical related set pieces but the balloon chase feels appropriately Muppety while being different enough to add some variety to the story.

27) Miss Piggy.

Miss Piggy is such a larger than life character and perhaps the character with the most to do in the series. She is a diva with aspirations of being famous, but she also knows characters and any time The Muppets need a fight scene they bring in Miss Piggy! As mentioned above, Frank Oz does a great job not only breathing life into the character but making her so different from Fozzie.

28) Cameo Watch: Steven Martin.

Steve Martin might do the most with his cameo. He is an over the top frustrated waiter, something anyone who’s ever worked in food service can relate to. Steve Martin is pretty much great in anything though.

29) The dinner date between Kermit and Miss Piggy is actually really nice, makes me understand why they date.

30) Rowlf the Dog.

Possibly the most interesting thing about Rowlf is how people have noted his personality matches Jim Henson’s the closest out of all of Henson’s characters. In recognition of this, Rowl didn’t speak in his film appearances for a while after Henson passed away. He’s a fun character already, but I think this detail adds a nice layer of heart to it.

31) “I Hope That Something Better Comes Along”

In typical Muppet fashion, something as relatable and common as heartache is turned into an upbeat bar tune. It’s one of the nicest songs in the film and a real ear worm. It is also essentially Jim Henson singing with himself so take a moment to let that set in.

32) Cameo Watch: Mel Brooks.

Okay, Mel Brooks might do the most with HIS cameo. Brooks commits to the comedy and insanity of the performance just as he would in any of his own films (Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs) and it really adds a shot of energy to the scene. Brooks is so active, he does so many little things to add to his character/performance/comedy. I wonder how much of it was improv.

33) So I feel like the filmmakers didn’t know how to get from Miss Piggy ditching Kermit for a gig to Miss Piggy rejoining the group on the road, so they literally decided to stop the movie and let the audience breathe for a moment. I love that.

34) “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday”

This is such a beautiful and bittersweet melody. It comes at the film’s low point, when the group thinks their dreams are done for. But the song is just so lovely it makes my heart warm. The lyrics are wonderful and I think it’s an amazing ballad. I love it.

35) Life lessons from Kermit the Frog.

Kermit: “I can’t spend my whole life running away from a bully.”

36) Oh quick, the film is almost over! Let’s get Bunsen and Beaker in at the end!

37) Kermit’s heartfelt plea, of choosing happiness over money and finding family/friends, is great. But Doc Hopper’s response to it is so sad.

Kermit: “If what I'm saying doesn't make any sense, well then... go ahead and kill me.” Doc Hopper [after a moment to think, reluctantly]: “All right boys. Kill him.”

38) Deus Ex Animal.

39) Cameo Watch: Cloris Leachmen.

40) Cameo Watch: Orson Welles.

Welles’ character’s name Lew Lord is actually a reference to real-life Producer Sir Lew Grade. When Jim Henson was trying to find a producer to make The Muppet Show, no American network was interested in the concept. Grade recognized the potential in the idea and helped make the show happen.

41) Ah, if only it were this easy.

Lew Lord: “Prepare the standard ‘Rich & Famous’ contract.”

42) The finale of this film, “Magic Store,” is a fun final number. It shows The Muppets have made it, they’re doing what they love. It’s the culmination of everything up to this point and even when things don’t go as they plan they’ll roll with it. And we’re given a great final message.

Kermit: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending…” Muppets: “Keep believing, keep pretending; we've done just what we've set out to do, thanks to the lovers, the dreamers, and you!”

The Muppet Movie might still very well be the best film to feature the classic characters. It has their trademark heart, humor, and imagination all in top form. You can watch it at any time, it ages very well. So whether it’s your first or last time putting it in, I’d say give The Muppet Movie a watch.

so my review for disenchanted is... it's fun. it doesn't go anywhere amazing, but there's some fun jokes and some fun characters. its an enjoyable watch with some characters that keep you watching, though i kept wanting them to wring more out of each episode, there is so much potential for a lot of the side characters.

as for characters, most characters aren't really fleshed out, so i didn't feel much connection to most of them, i only really care about luci tbh and bunty is sweet. i'm interested to see what happens with queen oona but seeing as most of her appearances have been small jokes or short appearances, idk, i'm not holding out for much development for her.

bean is good, in theory, though there's not much to her. they have a stereotype of what a non feminine woman is and keep falling back on it, falling back on her being drunk or high somewhere. we don't learn about her childhood, her education, her hobbies, her aspirations. her storylines revolve around her dad or elfo, mostly, under the guise of being about her journey.

some side characters become more interesting, like the kings advisor, odval, although i wish the secret society had been more than just a quick joke. others remain flat and uninteresting, clearly plot devices, not even offering jokes that are that good. i liked getting to learn more about bunty, and the king has some funny moments, but a lot of characters are forgettable. luci is a great break from the repetition or obvious storylines, he's unpredictable and chaotic and kept me watching. he's two steps away from being a fourth wall breaking character, narrating the events in his own way. love eric andres dry tone, luci is a great character i'd love to learn more about.

the pacing of the episodes is a bit random, there's no real connection between most of them and they don't always flow well, sometimes it felt like people's opinions and decisions changed randomly just to keep the plot going. the last episode repeated the same scene several times. the reccuring plot involving luci didn't really grip me and didn't go anywhere really, and has now been overshadowed by the plot of the last episode. i am interested to see where that goes, but i do wonder if the people who sent luci will get a moment to shine and be relevant again.

people keep comparing it to futurama, to the simpsons, but i don't think that gets us anywhere. it's made in a different era, set in a different era, made in different circumstances than for tv viewing. the voice acting is great, it's fun hearing familiar voices, and luci is reminiscent of benders carelessness (also reminds me of paul from the film paul which is a fave of mine), but it's a very different story. there are some weird vague mentions to things like feminism and gender spectrums but they fall flat, i felt unsure if they were being played as a joke or a reference and what the point of them was. there's also that random mention to cultural appropriation, speaking of which, the only two characters of colour are side characters, one completely just a plot device, with ambiguous race and not much depth. seriously guys? you put in elves and gnomes and lizard people but racial diversity was just too hard? put down the d&d handbooks and start being creative.

okay, i'll mention elfo, but briefly. he's annoying. i'm saying it, everyone else seems to be saying it, but what the fuck. it's not his obliviousness and naivety that's annoying, that could've been used well, but it's his crush on bean. i'm not invested, i don't care, it's not interesting. i really don't feel bad for this lil guy fancying a woman out of his league. they tried to give us a different female hero but still went with the 'poor nice guy who she ignores' trope? she deserves what leela and lisa didn't get with the guys chasing after them: the freedom to say no and have it stop. it added nothing to the plot, it became his whole character arc instead of learning to be bad and explore a new place. i'm glad nobody else seems to like him or the idea of him and bean ending up together. seriously, it's so overused, esp in groenings works. i just didn't have the patience to care about him any more as soon as i saw where it was going. bean escaped his advances, but barely, and suddenly she really cared about him despite being ambivalent earlier. the time progression didn't seem real enough to amount to that much character development, the time passage wasn't even clear, it just felt like ten episodes and suddenly luci and bean really cared about elfo all of a sudden. can't relate.

ok, elfo out of the way, what did i enjoy? the scenery, the banging theme song, the good one liners, every character john dimaggio voiced, that one time luci got captured that was quite fun to watch, the whole talking cat thing, uhh, some other stuff. seriously, you can enjoy watching it and not feel too bored, it's just the repetitive tropes that get a bit dull. i kept watching for the potential, a lot of the time. hoping for things to go farther than they did. the earlier eps are fun, the later ones i felt had odd pace and sudden character development/change and a lot of repeated content.

in the second series i want a lot more from these characters. they tried to fit in like three plot twists when most people would have preferred more character exploration, more believable development between bean, elfo and luci as friends. a lot of the episodes were bean and friends get drunk, fuck stuff up, go back to see the king. i don't want more of that in s2. i expected more depth to the plot seeing as multiple writers were involved in gravity falls, but it's ok if it's just fun too, but decide which you're going for because atm i'm not sure how seriously to take the twists or not.

i'd love to see more of hell, learn more about luci. i loved the mention of him having a 9 to 5 job in hell, there's so much that could be explored there, and robot hell was a blast in futurama. seriously, bring back dan as the dancing devil, that'd be fun. i'd have rathered luci having odd jobs from the devil than having two random people apparently controlling him but doing absolutely nothing at the same time. in s2, recycle the tired tropes into something new. throw out the 'old hooker' trope and put in more three dimensional women. get rid of the 'strong female character' idea you have in your heads and actually write a real female character. please, god, get more female writers, i can tell when a woman is written by a man and it's boring. i feel they need to let shion takeuchi have more involvement because i bet she'd do a better job with a lot of these elements but alas she's literally one of only three women on the team with any major involvement, and it shows. it's a show centred around a female character yet it's mostly all decided by men. it's 8 men to 3 women as far as i can tell. and only one person of colour, afaik. it really shows. i'm not surprised, but more people should be pissed off about this. ridiculous.

don't do anything with elfo he's fine where he is just leave him there. bring back tess the giant i want to know more about her. please let oona and odval have a friendship where they bitch about the king and have medieval scrabble nights or something. let literally any women interact with each other without hating each other or talking about men. give bean a girlfriend. don't give pendergast any more screen time people are obsessing over him for some reason and he doesn't deserve that. let the queens be friends or something. let them date. too many women hate each other in tv i'm tired. ramp up the goddamn puns i know u have more stored somewhere and the scenes of shop names etc are fun. have bean learn to drive a horse and cart or get a job she's good at or learn a new skill or make a female friend or something more than having her get drunk and fight her way out of a situation with no real consequences. ok i'm done.

AS I DIE AT MY DESK

Interview by Shawn Gibson

Can you tell me the meaning of the band name As I Die At My Desk? I imagine dying in a cubicle in corporate hell!

The honest answer to this is that it was a joke. I overheard a co worker say it at work and I thought it would be a hilarious band name. It is also a bit ironic as I always told myself that I would do work I truly love and follow my passions as they tell you that stuff in high school and college and it hasn't worked out that way for me yet! I am not deterred. I do get to make music in my spare time. Music gets to be my fun escape. It gets to be my artistic outlet that I don't have to share if I don't want to. All that aside I am a man who loves to laugh and loves to joke. Despite the themes and sounds of the music which are very real and emotionally heavy for me, the band name was a way to take the piss out of the situation. I can laugh at myself for being a weirdo who likes heavy music, where people scream and howl like demons and laugh even harder at how ridiculous I must look doing that in the bedroom for my music. I am pretty serious about most things, but I have to remember to have fun. That is what I think is important. I'm sorry it's not a very metal answer!

Suicide as Cleansing by As I Die at My Desk

You do everything in As I Die At My Desk, all instruments right?

Yes, I do all instruments and my main goal is to try to not suck. I actually record through a pre amp and I use different virtual amp sims like Amplitube for my tones. I used my Sterling by Music Man John Petrucci 7 string guitar, Ibanez BTB7 7 string bass, and an Alesis brand electric drum set for this record. It's a pretty basic setup, but given the size of my recording space, it's the best I can do. I have been writing for the past eight years or so. This is my first attempt at a metal release despite the fact I am a huge metal head! I was pretty happy with what I was able to do by myself.

What are your influences musically?

My influences range from classical music to jazz to anything under the rock umbrella. I am particularly interested in Soviet era composers. Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky. The first instrument I started playing was a cello at age 10. I graduated college in 2016 and gave a recital featuring Shostakovich and Prokofiev. The desperation and darkness they were able to convey so beautifully have influenced me greatly. I don't have a lot of experience with jazz, but the works of Coltrane, Thelonios Monk and especially Miles Davis have influenced me, as well. I just love especially experimental music and anything that ties to reshape and reform the genres wherein they find themselves pigeonholed. My music doesn't really sound like it to me, but Dream Theater and Iron Maiden are two of my favorites. I didn't actually start to get into doom or sludge until college. Now I love that stuff! Eyehategod is one of my newer favorite bands, as well as Sumac and YOB.

What are some of your favorite books and movies?

I tend to read non-fiction. I am a big history nerd. However I have spent a lot of time in the fiction world, as well. Some of my favorites are Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov. I am a big Lynch and Tarantino fan! Blue Velvet and Eraserhead are two of my favorite films. Reservoir Dogs had a really big impact on me, as well. I first saw it when I was 14. It was so gritty and real to me then. That was a very realistic show of violence.

Are you a fan of horror books or movies?

I was a bigger fan of horror when I was in high school. I must have read every Stephen King a dozen times. I don't tend to like a lot of horror books or movies. There are some exceptions, I love monster movies. Give me Jaws or Godzilla any day! I tend to like movies that are creepy or unsettling, but I don't get into paranormal stuff. There are plenty of flesh and blood horrors in our world that are much more terrifying than ghosts.

You have some very heavy music with some very dark themes. What inspired 'Suicide As Cleansing' as your album title?

I am depressed and have anxiety. What more is there to say? To answer your question, though, the title popped into my head one day. I remember I was reading something on social media about mental health and the act of suicide. Someone described suicide as an act of cleansing. That idea stuck with me and I thought about it for quite some time. I decided to use that in an overall positive way. I thought that since I was channeling my negative and destructive feeling into my music, I was attempting to kill myself. Attempting to kill a bad part of myself that I don't want to have to deal with all the time and thus conducting a cleansing of sorts. I wanted that to be the album title because it reflected the whole reason I was making the record. It doesn't help to keep those feelings bottled up cause they fester. I urge anyone who has suicidal or self harming thoughts to seek help. Talk to people; they will listen. You may feel like it doesn't help, but it does. I struggle, but I feel better when I know I'm safe to talk about it. Here's why I give my wife a huge shout-out for being so supportive and understanding!

What was the inspiration for your songs on 'Suicide As Cleansing'?

The inspiration for this whole record was feeling trapped and depressed. Modern day life appears to be doing that for younger generations these days. Waking up one day and realizing careers that you were dead set on are no longer sustainable. Seeing all of the political strife becoming more prominent and ruining friendly and familial relationships. We live in a very depressing world. I don't need to get into all the issues facing us but there are many and enough that are potentially world ending are enough, to make anyone uneasy. In that way I feel that genuine themes of feeling trapped, powerless, isolated and really angry are appropriate.

I would say "No Pride" is one of my favorites. The gallop of the drums, the riff! I feel myself rocking and swaying. Definitely banging my head!

Thanks! It might be my favorite song on the album. It was actually fun to record that one and I did it in far fewer takes than the other ones.

"Trapped In The Bass-Ment" is hypnotizing! It's almost a chance to catch your breath from the other six songs that precede it!

I appreciate the comments! The whole track was written and recorded in one sitting. I am a big fan of drone and ambient music so it seemed fitting. I felt that even I needed a break after "No Pride." It just hit me really hard in conjunction with all the earlier tracks. I worried it might be boring for people, but I silenced that voice. I try to make music for myself, but I really appreciate it when people like my work!

"Annihilate Me" is the equivalent of the musical Dim Mak! Nine-minutes-and-fifty-eight seconds of destruction! Tell me about this song.

"Annihilate Me" was written over a span of about three days. I was in the middle of a very depressive episode and I remember sitting down with my guitar and playing the heaviest, angriest, gnarliest stuff I could get out of it. There was no preconceived plan as to lyrics or vocals. After I recorded the guitars and drums, I screamed anything that came to mind. It was a very cathartic episode and I view it as the perfect ending to an unpleasant journey.

Where did the artwork for 'Suicide As Cleansing' come from? What does it mean to you?

The cover art is a photograph taken from my lovely wife, who gets another shout-out. We were hiking at the Englewood Metropark and we noticed the tree almost all by itself. She took a bunch of photos of it because it was cool and interesting, also creepy. One thing I remember clearly, was the tree's base was covered with these beautiful yellow flowers. In a way I felt it represented the album. The tree itself was dead and bare. It was a little unsettling especially in the photos my wife took. The fact that life had sprung from this dead tree seemed to fit this theme of killing a part of yourself or perhaps a rebirth.

Calculating the Cost of Existence by As I Die at My Desk

Your second album 'Calculating The Cost of Existence' (2019) came out in December. What can you tell us about the new project?

I will say in terms of sound, the new record came out with a different sound. It's a doomy, sludgey mess for sure. There are more introspective parts included. The music is expressing a greater array of feelings than the first.

Another one-man effort?

Yes, I did all the instruments again. As long as I possess the tools to do it, it certainly makes it easier in the creative process not having to deal with other personalities or egos on something so deeply personal to me. Now with that said, I don't mind collaborating or anything in the future.

Is that strenuous at times doing everything in the band?

The worst part about recording is I am not the best musician. It is strenuous when I have to perform everything and I am not that great. (laughs) My skills on guitar and drums are intermediate at best. I have played bass longer so I am a much more confident bass player than I am anything else but that's not saying a lot. It also doesn't help that I don't like the sound of my voice. I fancy myself as a composer, not a performer.

As I Die At My Desk is from Dayton Ohio right?

Yes, the band is based out of Dayton, where I have lived for most of my life so far.

What are some bands from Ohio you love?

To be honest, I don't know a ton of bands from Ohio. I will say I am a fan of Mouth of the Architect and Others by No One out of Dayton, Cloudkicker out of Columbus. Oh I can't forget Skeletonwitch!

Have you been to Ohio Doomed and Stoned Fest?

This might be shocking but I have never heard of Ohio Doomed and Stoned Fest. So no I haven't been but I am certainly interested now!

Will As I Die At My Desk play live or tour down the road?

Well, As I Die At My Desk will probably remain a studio entity. As I said I wouldn't be opposed to any kind of collaboration or possible touring but I don't have any plans for that at the moment. Now for my pretentious answer. As an artist I do not want to feel confined to any one medium as it exists. As I Die At My Desk was born out of specific life circumstances. As long as these circumstances provide emotional weight and depth for me, this project will continue. Once that source dries up(if it ever really does) then I will move on to a new project. As it stands I have a few other projects that I am working on that I can't discuss much yet. Stay tuned!

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