I’ve been either too busy or not inspired enough to post anything of substance over the last couple of weeks, but my media consumption has continued unabated.  So here’s a summary of some of what I’ve been experiencing:

Fang Island (Self-titled album).  I downloaded this off of itunes after Zach and I saw this Brooklyn-based happy metal machine open for Red Sparowes in Sacramento a couple of months back.  There’s something both heartwarming and ludicrous about this quintet, which aptly describes their music as “the sound of everybody high-fiving each other.” While Fang Island on record is good, they are even more of a beer-swilling, head-banging, vocal-harmonizing guitar-soloing juggernaut live.  Like Styx for hipsters…in a good way.  Fang Island provided a welcome palate cleanser at the Red Sparowes show by essentially bursting the bubble of avant metal humorlessness.  Also, the whole band is originally from Rhode Island and one of the guys in the band used to work at this great video rental place in Providence.

Battlestar Gallactica (the first three or so seasons of the series).  Holy Lords of Kobol is Battlestar Gallactica good!  Sci-fi of the highbrow/refracted mirror kind, and amazingly great considering the poor quality of its source material.  Plus, Edward James Olmos literally captains the ship as Commander Bill Adama, who is about as stoic as they come, but isn’t above punching his son in the gut while sparring in the gym.  BSG has all of The Next Generation’s high seriousness without its sometimes cloying moral clarity, and tackles a series of topical issues including torture, electoral politics, civilian command of the military, and journalistic ethics.  And the character development is great.

Inception. Roaring Shark West Coast saw Chris Nolan’s latest exercise in self-serious conceptual weirdness a couple of nights ago.  I had heard some devastatingly bad reviews of this movie, so I went in with low expectations, and was consequently pleased.  The plot is ridiculous but nonetheless entertaining, though it annoyingly manages to recycle a whole lot of Freud, whose theories on identity projection, the subconsciousness, totems, etc. are ransacked for the purpose of making art (or artiness).  The sets are predictably elegant and the cinematography clean, though my favorite part of the movie involves what can only be described as Nolan getting his way with a big budget and inserting a protracted ski and snowmobile-based battle in an alpine forest.  This is probably the closest I’ve ever seen Nolan get to goofy humor.  Nolan brings out his repertory company for this one – Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy and, oh yeah, Michael Caine show up for the dreamy madness.

Just a quick report on the World Cup final, which I watched from the noisy, beery interior of Sacramento’s Tapa the World. Despite the fact that basically no “hispanoparlantes” were in attendance, except for one or two Mexican guys from the kitchen, the mostly Anglo crowd was solidly behind Spain.  I found the one free stool at the bar and planted myself there, next to some restaurant guy who was off duty and who was drinking rather heavily (though not a vino tinto, as he should have been).  Interesting, bartenders and waiters alike at Tapa the World were treating Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout – also known as the greatest beer ever brewed – as if it were liquor (which it kind of is, at 9% alcohol content), drinking little mini-glasses at regular intervals.  I was just impressed that Old Rasputin was on tap!  I had a very nice cheese plate featuring a satisfyingly hard and salty Roncal and some bread and olives.  It would have gone nicely with a glass of rioja.  

The game itself was interesting, though not what I expected.  Both teams seemed nervous early on, and Spain was not nearly as in command of the ball as they were in their semi-final match against Germany (surprisingly, match statistics claim Spain had ball possession for 57% of the game).  Both sides missed some fairly good opportunities and fouled each other with a vengeance.  There was little in the way of pretty football a la Spain x Germany, but the match was generally exciting to watch.  Spanish stars David Villa and Sergio Ramos failed to score, and about the flashiest thing on the field were the hazmat orange uniforms of the Dutch side.  Spanish goalkeeper Arturo Casillas made some nice saves, and at the end of regulation time, the match was still scoreless.  Eventually, in the second period of overtime, Andrés Iniesta scored for Spain and it was basically over after that.  A couple of minutes later, Tapa the World erupted into a loud cheer – I think people wanted to sing Spain’s fight song, but no one knew what it was.  There were a few stray “olés!”  I had seen what I had come to see, and happy to see Spain win their first World Cup final, I left and headed home.

Very sad news from the world of avant-metal…ISIS is disbanding.  With the end of ISIS, is their strange little corner of the musical universe at an end as well?  For whatever reason, I can’t really get excited about Pelican, Red Sparowes et al. without ISIS out front, waving the flag.

While I’m of course very disappointed by the news, at least the band went out on a high note, after releasing the excellent Wavering Radiant.  Weirdly, I found out about the ISIS break-up through NPR, which has decided to throw its high-brow librarian image to the wind and stream some blistering metal on its website.

The latest round of bands gigging at Sacramento’s Fire Escape and Boardwalk may not live up to the lofty example of Blownload, Sexrat, or the Snot Cocks as far as hilariously bad band names, but June does offer some decent pickings. Enjoy:

Friday, June 11 @ The Fire Escape

“Summer Showdown 2″ (night 1)

Fallrise

Zuhg

Dogfood (that sounds about right)

Exhale

Saturday, June 12 @ The Fire Escape

“Summer Showdown 2″ (night 2)

Splitself

March into Paris

Allinaday

Flatline

(I’m hoping for a Fallrise-Splitself final round.  Maybe they’ll form a Voltron-like super band called Fallrisesplitself.  Also, a band called Coldcokt is playing at the ‘Scape on 6/25.)

Saturday, June 12 @ The Boardwalk

Conducting From the Grave

The Antioch Synopsis (sounds like a terrible Tom Clancy-esque thriller)

Journal

Aurelia

Beyond all Ends

Lifeforms

My Murderous Intentions

Karakas (because the city of Caracas, Venezuela sounds badass when misspelled!)

(By the way, how long did this show run?  Two days?  Could it still be going on?)

Here’s a hilariously staged photograph from May 15th in Calaveras, when Kelley and I got married.  Zach and Chu were there, and the wedding photographer couldn’t resist capturing Zach and I affirming the eternal bonds of male friendship.  It looks like we got this taken at Walmart, and that the 100% real woods behind us are a backdrop.

Zach – there are also some good, non-handshaking photos of you, and of you and Chu.

I tend to react with skepticism to articles commemorating books, albums, and so forth just because they’ve recently been repackaged, reissued, or otherwise trotted out again in superficially updated or improved form – often with the intent of separating fanboys and fangirls from their dollars. This is particularly true when the publication doing the commemorating is Rolling Stone, a magazine that seems to spend most of its time these days finding one or another sixties-generation artist or album to commemorate – a form of red meat thrown directly into the jaws of the magazine’s rapidly graying and generally musically unadventurous readership. But I’ll make an exception for the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album Exile on Main Street, which is currently being rereleased with some alternate takes, additional tracks, and other assorted bells and whistles.

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Even though Zach and Chu kept their wedding super, double top secret, I figured I’d welcome them into the bonds of holy matrimony via the Roaring Shark announce box.  Congratulations, and your new blender is in the mail! (kidding)

My interest in Prussia goes back to the European history class I took senior year in high school, when I was first confronted by an unfamiliar territory splayed across the map of central Europe, a phantom country whose capital – Berlin – was familiar, but whose national territory circa 1870 represented an odd amalgam of lands now belonging to Germany, Poland, Denmark, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg). As I learned, prior to German unification in 1871, Prussia was one of a myriad of kingdoms and smaller sovereignties laying claim to bits and pieces of what would eventually become the unified German state. Surprisingly to me, it was Austria – often thought of these days as a sort of quaint southeastern afterthought to Germany proper – that for centuries represented the most important player in the game of German and Central European power politics, with Austria’s Habsburg monarch by tradition retaining the (increasingly ceremonial title) of Holy Roman Emperor. Though as I would learn, Austrian hegemony or quasi-hegemony in a disunited Germany would become increasingly tenuous as the eighteenth century bled into the nineteenth, and as Prussia expanded outward from its traditional power base in Brandenburg (now in northeastern Germany) and Ducal Prussia (now on Poland’s Baltic coast).

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Note: this post engages in a series of blatant and hopefully amusing stereotypes.

My brief daily commute between Sacramento and Davis gives me some time to think about advertising – this is usually prompted by the many billboards posted along the side of I-80, which lately have included one from Heineken, a watery Dutch lager widely consumed by frat boys and which tastes about the same as Bud Light.  Heineken’s current ad campaign, centered on the rather enigmatic tagline “Give Yourself a Good Name,” has been getting me thinking of late.  I say “enigmatic” in reference to the tagline because of its odd juxtaposition of the notion of winning or maintaining one’s “good name” – suggestive of a system of values rooted in the landed aristocracy – and the numerous hipster cultural cues embedded in the campaign’s print and TV advertisements.  Stepping back from this problem for a minute and looking at the (assumed) marketing motive behind the campaign, it seems like the idea is to associate Heineken with a certain type of hip, New York-centric, twenty-something bar culture, in which the idea of “giv[ing] yourself a good name” might mean something along the lines of burning a copy of the latest Animal Collective album for a friend, introducing your roommate to that hot girl from the artists’ collective, or hopefully from the perspective of the advertiser, buying your mustachioed, fixie-riding compatriots some Heineken!  In other words, Heineken is trying to trade up, at least at the level of appearance, from the frat boys who have reliably consumed Heineken since time immemorial, to the NYC post-college crowd.

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While all the talk about the alleged “death of conservatism” that followed Obama’s election was hilariously off-target, it certainly doesn’t bode well for the conservative movement if it adopts the strategy of silencing its own intellectuals.  Case in point: David Frum, who has written thoughtfully about the GOP’s tactical errors during the health care debate, has apparently been ousted from his position at the American Enterprise Institute.  The life-blood of any political philosophy is open, honest debate and a capacity for self-criticism.  I’m not saying liberals are necessarily any better – witness the rough treatment given to Joe Lieberman.  Regardless, I’d much rather see a conservative movement led by  George Will, David Brooks, and David Frum than by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.  

William F. Buckley is rolling over in his grave…