"Super" Heroes

Recently I caught Woody Harrelson’s “superhero” film, “Defendor”.  Add that to the other three films featuring a “superhero” who has NO super powers.

First:  Batman and Iron Man.  Unlike Superman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic 4, the Avengers, etc., these two have no intrinsic super powers.  Really, their “super powers” are “so f**king rich they can buy Batmobiles and flying armor”.  What’s funny is that we’ve yet to see a real billionaire, like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, do anything like this.  Jeff Bezos, where is your Bezomobile?  Anyhow.  So what does a would-be superhero without any huge amount of money – a regular guy – do?

Defendor (2009).  Woody Harrelson becomes Defendor (spelled with an “o”).  He puts on a black costume with a duct taped D and paints a black mask over his face – not even a cloth mask he can take off.  Kat Dennings, the hotter of the Two Broke Girls, plays a hooker who befriends him.   Defendor is a bit “not there” and isn’t particularly good at fighting.  He believes “Captain Industry” is the bad guy who needs to be taken down.  There is a corrupt cop, Dooney (Elias Koteas), and his sometime boss (Michael Kelly, who we recognize from “House of Cards”) helps him out.  Overall I found it mostly frustrating and “when will this be over”?  Dennings is eye candy but Harrelson getting his ass kicked in Toronto doesn’t really make for a compelling story.

Watch it once and then go back to a regular Marvel or DC superhero movie.

Super (2010).  Rainn Wilson becomes the Crimson Bolt.  He’s trying to save his wife (Liv Tyler) from the clutches of an evil drug dealer (Kevin Bacon – in another film) while assisted by Libby (Ellen Page) who becomes his sidekick.  He’s inspired by Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion).   He’s remarkably effective notwithstanding his complete lack of superpowers or even special skills. 

Watch it once and then go back to a regular Marvel or DC superhero movie.

Kick-Ass (2010).  I reviewed these two earlier (1/24/14) so I'll keep the reviews brief.  Refer back to the prior blog post for more detail on these.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson becomes Kick-Ass.  And does so again in the sequel, Kick-Ass 2 (2013).  In the first film he’s up against legitimate bad guy Mafia boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), and allied with Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), a former cop turned Batman without much in the way of actual super powers or gadgets.  Big Daddy has been training his daughter as his sidekick, Hit Girl (Chloe Grace-Moretz).   Things get very nasty and violent.

There’s an equally nasty and violent sequel, Kick-Ass 2, in which D’Amico’s son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) becomes the Motherf**ker to avenge his father.  This was the film which got publicity when Jim Carrey, who plays Colonel Stars & Stripes, heavily bad-mouthed the film after it came out.  Hit Girl retired to focus on a normal social life at school, leaving KA to recruit another team of nobodies to help him.  For his part, Motherf**ker recruits his own team, including the remarkably impressive Mother Russia.  

Like the first one, it has a heavy dose of violence.  I’d say it’s rare sequel which equals or exceeds the quality of the original.  I have NOT read the source material comic books, so I can’t comment on how faithful the movies are to the books, nor on their relative merit or lack thereof.

Unlike the other two, I got these two on DVD, and as you might imagine, I can recommend them, IF you can tolerate a “Scarface” level of violence.   

Trump Is NOT Hitler

Thank GOD.   Now we’ve had about one year of our new President, and Alec Baldwin remains a free man.   As do I, and I’ve made my own share of jokes at Trump’s expense – publicly, on Facebook - though obviously with a considerably smaller audience than Baldwin.

As Bill Maher complained, the problem with incessantly comparing anyone you dislike to Hitler is that when someone rolls by who IS Austrian, has a small mustache, and is bent on world domination and hatred of Jews, no one takes you seriously.  It’s the Fraudulent Lupine Outcry by Pre-Adult Male.  

The Dolfmeister realized in November 1923 that his potential subjects were sticklers for law and order, so a Putsch wouldn’t do.  He bided his time, and in January 1933, despite having lost the prior year election to the Blimp, succeeded at getting appointed Chancellor by a cabal of clowns who should have known better.

This didn’t give him full control, however.  It took the Reichtag Fire of March 1933 to result in emergency powers, which then wound up with socialists, communists, and everyone else who didn’t like Hitler round up and put in the fresh, new camp known as Dachau. 

So where’s our Reichtag Fire?   It’s been a year and we’re still waiting.  Is the NSA that lazy?

The closest we’ve seen to this was 9/11 >> Patriot Act >> Gitmo.  But on January 20, 2009, Bush Jr. voluntarily relinquished power, without the Red Army above his bunker.  Come on – Gitmo couldn’t hold all the people who badmouthed Bush. 

Trump is definitely self-centered, egomaniac, narcissistic, etc.  The world revolves around him.  He’s definitely full of himself – I would argue, even MORE than Hitler.  But he’s also lazy.   I don’t think he wants to be Fuhrer.  That’s TOO MUCH WORK.  When’s the last time you saw a picture of Hitler playing golf?  

Then there’s the Night of the Long Knives (June 1934), in which Hitler purged the SA and Party of any and all party rivals, notably Ernst Roehm and Gregor Strasser, anyone who might pose a threat from within.  What we’ve seen with Trump is a piecemeal purge, ad hoc, including his erstwhile Goebbels, Steve Bannon – not a swift, comprehensive purge of his administration.  It smacks more of incompetence than consolidation of power.   

If I were Hitler, I’d be offended by the comparison.  Hitler worked his butt off to be Fuhrer.  He took it seriously.  He wrote a book, raised a movement, etc etc. and didn’t play golf.  He didn’t inherit millions from his father – or anyone else.  Nor was he a nepotist.   In fact, he gave his nephew such a hard time – no handouts and a threat to involuntarily join the Wehrmacht – that the boy went to America, joined the US Navy, and settled on Long Island. 

Whenever I see complaints that the President is playing golf, instead of invading Poland or nuking North Korea, I say, “Thank GOD.”   The less he’s in the White House, the less we have to worry.

Finally, I’ve discovered the closest analogy to Trump, aside from Trump himself:  He’s CARTMAN.

Aldous Huxley

Yet again, I check my blog records only to find that I haven’t actually commented on this writer.  Here goes.

He’s best known for two major works:  Brave New World, and The Doors of Perception.   The latter was used by the famous L.A. band to name themselves, although little of their material really has much to do with the subject matter of that book.  It’s typically paired with Heaven & Hell (likewise, no content connection with the Black Sabbath album of 1980), as they both tend to focus on altering consciousness.

Before I get into his two major works, a brief biography.

Born in England in 1894, he suffered blindness for awhile which prevented him from pursuing a career in science like his grandfather.  Instead, he became a prolific writer.  In the 1950s he moved to the US.  He died on November 22, 1963, along with C.S. Lewis, and a more famous person, who died under more notable circumstances, John F. Kennedy.  Per his request, his wife gave him an injection of 100 mikes of LSD on his death bed.

Huxley actually wrote a lot:  in addition to many essays, he wrote no less than 11 novels, most if not all overshadowed by his two major works; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley.

Brave New World.   A dystopian saga, written in 1931, about a totalitarian society in the future (2540 AD), which remarkably coexists with a free, anarchic society.  Peace is kept by “soma”, a mysterious (fictional) hallucinogen.  A “savage”, John, is brought to the society, becomes somewhat of a celebrity, but ultimately decides he’s not a fan of the dictatorship.

The most obvious comparison is with 1984, by Orwell, and Huxley was an admirer of Orwell and even wrote to him complimenting him on that novel.  Between the two, I find Orwell’s book much better, but Huxley deserves credit for recognizing that such a society might well rely upon drugs to keep its subjects docile and obedient.  Orwell seemed to assume that after years of misinformation, people would simply accept the government’s story and doubt their own experience and judgment. 

Christopher Hitchens wrote a comparison between the two, Why Americans Are Not Taught History.  [Perhaps a blog about Hitchens would be appropriate... maybe later.]

The book was made into a movie twice: first in 1980, then later in 1998.  I’ve only seen the 1998 version, which features Peter Gallagher and Leonard Nimoy. 

The Doors of Perception/Heaven & Hell.   Non-fiction, and fairly short:  Doors (1954) is about his experience with mescaline.  Most of his observations have to do with flowers and classical music.  In that regard it’s considerably less interesting than the subject matter would imply.  I found Albert Hofmann’s book (LSD: My Problem Child) to be far more intriguing, even though it’s written by a scientist and not a novelist.  As noted above, Huxley died in 1963, well before Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and other psychedelic bands came around; in 1963 the Beatles were still in their pop phase and 5 years before “Revolution #9”.  Add him to Fitzhugh Ludlow, another “trip-writer” (1860s) denied the privilege of the appropriate music to accompany his adventures, Ludlow’s being highly concentrated hashish, which was legal in New York state back then.

Heaven & Hell (1956) offers the remarkable assertion:  medieval peasants were effectively tripping in their everyday lives.  Huxley argues that their highly substandard diets with vitamin deficiencies, plus the Church’s omnipresent obsession with death and the afterlife, essentially gave these poor people a continuous bad trip.  I’m not aware that anyone took up the experiment of flirting with scurvy to emulate psychedelics:  Huxley himself apparently didn’t bother, as mescaline, LSD, etc. made such an attempt pointless.

   

He also claims that you can trip off breathing a mixture of seven parts oxygen, three parts carbon dioxide.  Never heard that before. 

Overall I found his nonfiction writing to be somewhere in between Orwell (crystal clear) and Hitchens (oppressively pedantic and obtuse) with the fiction being unobjectionable.  I’ll have to read Brave New World Revisited, his nonfiction analysis of his story, in 1958, after several decades, the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and Orwell’s 1984 (1949).   

Clueless Heathers

Recently I caught two older movies I’d neglected over the years because the subject matter wasn’t really my “cup of Lipton Diet Green Tea with Mixed Berries”.   They turned out to be entertaining notwithstanding the foregoing assessment, which also remained accurate.

Clueless (1995).   Alicia Silverstone’s major role, from 1995.   She plays a ditzy high school girl (Cher, named after the famous singer/actress) who is the head of her clique.   Actually she’s fairly bright, the clever part about this being that her intelligence is hidden behind her ostensible vapidness and almost exclusive focus on contemporary pop culture.   Paul Rudd plays her step-brother, Dan Hedaya plays her father (an overworked but powerful attorney), and Jeremy Sisto is here in an early role as a heart-throb.   Brittany Murphy plays a fashion-challenged new arrival who Cher takes under her wing.  The clever part of the film is that it’s like a macrocosm of Cher herself:  witty and intelligent despite an otherwise non-special subject matter and lead character.  The early appearance of cell phones and reference to Mark Wahlberg as “Marky Mark” (back when he was a rap artist and not a serious actor) are amusing elements dating this to the mid-1990s.  

Heathers (1985).   With Winona Ryder acting as the worried mom in “Stranger Things”, it’s fun to see her so young here, even looking like a well-coiffed and dressed predecessor to Eleven herself.

Shannon Doherty is one of three abusive Heathers at a high school in Ohio.  A much-younger Winona Ryder is the girl, Veronica, trying to fit in with them, which means she has to do whatever mean things they ask her to do.  She befriends fellow student J.D. (Christian Slater) who is somewhat strange and off-balance, but nonetheless handsome and charming in his own way.  They engineer the deaths of the Heathers – and an abusive pair of jocks - but make them look like accidents or suicide.   Eventually Veronica reaches a point where she no longer agrees with J.D.’s agenda.  Overall a kind of dark and cynical “high school revenge” story, somewhat entertaining.  I can’t say that was the case at ASP (1982-86) but I can understand if others going to high school at the same time might sympathize with Veronica more than I did.  Though as dark and cynical as this film is, the subject matter doesn’t come close to “Stranger Things”.  

Hearing Aids

Recently we caught AC/DC on what will probably be their last tour.   A concert originally scheduled for March 2016 was postponed six months to September, and longtime vocalist Brian Johnson was replaced – for this tour – with infamous Guns N’Roses singer Axl Rose.  It turns out that Johnson, who had weathered 36 years of touring with AC/DC, lost his hearing not from touring, but from his side hobby racing cars.  D’oh!   Contrast that with Pete Townshend, whose hearing loss is directly related to those full power Marshall stacks behind him.

My hearing has always been subpar, even before we moved to Paris in 1979, and well before we started going to concerts (1984).   I’ve never seen The Who in concert – was never that much of a fan.   I’ve seen Motorhead a few times, but the loudest concert was actually Y&T at Jaxx in 2002 – that was actually painfully loud. 

Originally my ambition was to attend the US Military Academy, aka West Point, and become an Army officer.  Life had other plans:  my hearing was below military specifications.   This also disqualified me from ROTC, the National Guard – as a private – and even JAG (military lawyers) as the JAG recruiters refused to waive the hearing requirement even for a non-combat role.  

Eventually I wound up getting hearing aids, the newest set of which I finally got today.   This pair can be calibrated and tweaked by – guess what? – an app.  We’ll see how they work.  The prior set, also purchased from Costco, lasted about five years before the left one crapped out.

I recall one set which fit in the ear itself, filling up the entire space.   The next set went down inside, with a small antenna to pull them out.  The current format is behind the ear with a bud going into the ear canal, plus a small rubber earpiece. 

With eyesight, glasses or contact lenses will bring you back up to 20/20 vision.  Unfortunately, hearing aids are not the same.  They take  you from abysmal hearing just up to marginally less than bad.  However, they do make a big difference.   Listening to music, for one, is a remarkably more pleasant experience with them, as they pick up the higher frequencies I’d otherwise miss.  Without them, music is muddy and dull.    Plus hearing all the awful noises my car makes as it gets older is another benefit.  And of course, hearing people talk, especially if they’re not standing right in front of me. 

 

The other major necessity is being able to hear in court:  the judge, the witnesses and/or parties, and opposing counsel.  Lately more courts have hearing assisted devices (e.g. Fairfax and Loudoun), but unfortunately this is more the exception than the rule.  I had a trial in Loudoun County a few years ago and the device worked perfectly in a huge courtroom: I could hear the Judge, the witnesses, the attorneys, everyone.  Hopefully the new ones will help for those courts, the majority, which don’t.   We’ll have to see.

Never Say Die!

It’s not here because I only now discovered this album, or because I bought a new and amazing remaster that changes the game completely.  In fact, I stopped upgrading our original Paris (FNAC) purchased vinyl to 180 grain at Sabotage, so our vinyl version of this album is the one we bought in high school in the 1980s.  I do have a remastered CD (2004 Universal/Sanctuary).

I’m commenting on this because this was on my DP/LZ/BS queue and it came up to listen to.  It’s the last (#8) of the original slew of Black Sabbath albums with Ozzy Osbourne, and its tour was the last with Ozzy, Van Halen being the up and coming band opening for them.  My impression is that it’s generally held in bad repute by 1) non-fans who don’t really like Sabbath and only willing to say good things if the album, e.g. Paranoid, is so obviously musically significant that they would look like idiots if they ignored or criticized it; and 2) Black Sabbath fans who prefer Ronnie James Dio over Ozzy Osbourne.  For them, Heaven & Hell trumps any of the Ozzy albums, even Paranoid or Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath (my favorite).  Us Sabbath fans who do prefer Ozzy to Dio (like me) generally concede it’s a substandard album, but listening to it again, sober on the treadmill, I’ve come to some fresh conclusions.

First off, Bill is drumming like crazy here.  Moreover, the solos on even some of the otherwise less memorable songs is still blazing.  So whatever else might have been going badly for them at the time – e.g. Ozzy leaving and then coming back, refusing to sing any Dave Walker material – when it came time to press RECORD and PLAY THE MUSIC they stepped up and got the job done.  Were they coked up?  Strung out?  Hung over? Who knows.  Somehow they did it.

Actually, I should add a third category of NSD haters: the band itself.  Bill Ward seems to be the only one who defends it, and given his performance I’m not surprised.

Second, the prior albums were so good, that this album was doomed to suffer by comparison.  Only the Beatles seemed to rise to the occasion of consistently outdoing themselves – coming from a fan who prefers the White Album to Dr. Pepper (and I know others who prefer Abbey Road). 

Third, while I hear some jazzy stuff in there – particularly “Air Dance”, which is actually my favorite track, “Junior’s Eyes” being #2 – it still rocks.  In a sense, they wound up like Budgie, pushing in some non-rock directions to break up the monolithic mold of the prior doomy albums.  They recorded the album at Sounds Interchange in Toronto (the Canadian capital) and Rush Jr. aka Max Webster were recording Mutiny Up My Sleeve at the same time.  Kim Mitchell mentions this, though no one in the Black Sabbath camp seems to mention Max Webster.  Then again, Tony was also hanging out with Frank Zappa, who accompanied them on the tour, so perhaps yet another famous mustache-and-SG guitarist had his own influences which no one seems to acknowledge.  Frank Sabbath?  Perish the thought.

Fourth, listening to this not immediately after Technical Ecstasy (#7), but with the benefit of a few proto-Whitesnake albums by David Coverdale, returning to Sabbath was actually more of a relief and welcome rather than a disappointment.  So I may have been more predisposed to be favorable than previously.

The bottom line is that if you listen to it on its own, without trying to compare it to the prior or later albums, you might actually enjoy it.   

The Sword and Witchcraft

I’ve been trying to get my brother – who mostly shares my taste in music and is my most consistent concert companion - into stoner rock, but he’s been reluctant and indifferent.  Recently he articulated his major beef:  “all the bands sound like they’re ripping off Black Sabbath.  If I wanted to listen to Black Sabbath, I’d listen to Black Sabbath.”  Fair enough dispute, though after having listened to Pentagram and sHeavy, plus Witchcraft & The Sword, adding in some Obsessed, I’d say the more accurate critique would not be that they all sound like Black Sabbath, rather that they all sound like each other.

http://thehardtimes.net/news/innovative-stoner-metal-album-blends-influences-black-sabbath-black-sabbath/

Funny enough, let’s talk about Witchcraft.  They’re from Sweden, of all places, so add them to ABBA and Ace of Base, then add in Opeth and Ghost BC.   Supposedly they started as a de facto Pentagram tribute band, which are for their part Washington DC’s answer to – drum roll, please  - Black Sabbath.   I can hear that.  But I hear enough other stuff thrown in that it becomes a bit different.  Still heavy, still droning, still riffing, but different.   Why?  Because vocalist Magnus Pelander, instead of copying Ozzy Osbourne, as sHeavy vocalist Steve Hennessy does (while looking like early-era Whitesnake David Coverdale) – mind you, Hennessy is the only one who comes close to getting Ozzy’s voice down - or even copying Pentagram vocalist Bobby Liebling – who looks more like a long-haired Marty Friedman than Ozzy Osbourne – he’s actually copying The Sword vocalist John Cronise.   See?  Mixing it up by copying each other instead of Ozzy, Tony, Geezer or Bill.  

For that matter, I’ve yet to hear a stoner rock vocalist who sounds anything like Ronnie James Dio.  Then again, Hennessy is the only stoner rock vocalist I’ve heard who sounds like Ozzy.  But sHeavy sounds so much like Ozzy-era Sabbath that many of us thought their early track “Electric Sleep” was a long-lost Sabbath song.  Listen to it yourself and decide.

 

Incidentally, Pentagram won’t be touring much anymore these days, as Liebling is going to prison for beating up his mom.  Yeah.  Liebling has been a heroin addict for a while, but like most addicts swerves from periods of relatively clean stability where he has his s**t together, to other times when he’s more of a colossal screwup.  It’s sad because musically the albums, including the most recent, Curious Volume, are actually pretty good.  In fact, you’d never know what a colossal screwup Liebling was by his music.  They’ve been around since the early 70s, but attempts during that decade to get a record deal went south on two major occasions:  he turned off Gene Simmons & Paul Stanley (KISS, you know), and then Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman (Blue Oyster Cult, you know).  It wasn’t until the 1980s that Pentagram finally released an album.   I managed to catch them live at American University and then the Baltimore Soundstage, both times headlining.  Anyhow.

Back to Witchcraft.  They have five albums, Witchcraft, Firewood, The Alchemist, Legend, and Nucleus.   All of them are pretty much the same, of equal quality as well as sound, with no major departures.  There’s some softer interludes and change-ups which break the monotony, so you can listen to an entire album without getting bored – though a five album marathon might be pushing it.  I haven’t been able to see them live yet.  They’re from Sweden.  They need to ask Papa or Mikael Akerfeldt who does their visas, as neither Ghost nor Opeth seem to have any trouble getting into the US to tour. 

Having absorbed their repertoire with much appreciation and satisfaction, I’m now swerving back to The Sword, who are from Austin, Texas.  Although I’ve yet to catch Witchcraft in concert, I’ve been lucky enough to see The Sword a few times:  the (new) 9:30 Club in DC in 2010, opening for Kyuss Lives at the Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore (2011), headlining the R’N’Roll Hotel in DC in 2015, then opening for Opeth at the Fillmore Silver Spring in 2016.  Not particularly energetic or exciting live, though: more of a band that just comes out and plays their music.  Now they have six albums, plus a live album:  Age of Winters (2006), Gods of the Earth (2008), Warp Riders (2010), Apocryphon (2012), High Country (2015), and an acoustic version of that album, Low Country (2016).  The Sword are somewhat faster than Witchcraft, but share this deal where every album sounds pretty much the same, making a multiple disc marathon somewhat dull. 

Song Length.  Black Sabbath songs are relatively short, with “The Warning” from the first album being the longest studio track and the extended “Wicked World” from Live At Last being the longest live track.  Witchcraft have several 10-15 minute songs.  The Sword songs are about 5-7 minutes long.  And The Obsessed scarcely tax your patience, with songs which are 3-5 minutes long, fairly brief and intense.   Though if Wino’s on it, be it The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, or Spirit Caravan, we’re talking some measure of doom involved.

Then you have Earthless.  They’re coming around on tour next spring, so I decided to listen to them again to determine if I wanted to see them for the first time in concert.  I only have two of their albums, the split with Harsh Toke and Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky.  Here we’re talking 15 minute instrumental jams.  But it’s not mellow and laid back like the Grateful Dead or the Allman Brothers, rather it’s intense soloing like Deep Purple’s “Child In Time” or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”.  You kind of have to be in the mood for that kind of thing.  But it’s clearly different than Black Sabbath.

Even bands which sound like each other, like Fu Manchu and Nebula (thanks to Eddie Glass, a common member), there’s subtle distinctions.  FM are more straight ahead and even somewhat punk oriented, with shorter songs and subject matter about skateboarding or vans, whereas Nebula have longer songs and are space-oriented.  Bottom line is that you have to have the patience and inclination to really listen to the music before you can begin to distinguish them from each other – and from Black Sabbath – but the differences are there.  Black Sabbath obviously serves as the starting point, but each of these bands take slightly different directions.   For some, Pink Floyd is the opposite end they’re going for; for others it’s the Misfits or Ramones.

As for the overall resemblance to Black Sabbath?  As it is, they have 9 studio albums with Ozzy Osbourne, three with Dio + the Heaven & Hell album (The Devil You Know), 5 with Tony Martin, and one each from Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes.  Is that really enough?