AFTIRTM: The Matrix

Because I've only got seven at the moment and have no wish to rank them, I'm going to roll out my list of Awesome Films that Inadvertently Ruined the Movies in a pretty much random order. First up is The Matrix.

What it was:
An epic adventure/mind screw with enough cod-theology to justify the use of the vaunted "multi-layered" label.

What it gave the hacks:
Bullet time. Also the idea that "stoic acting," i.e, "no facial expression whatsoever" is acceptable in a Western action film (er, that's Western in the "not-Asia" sense, not Western in the "cowboys and indi- Native Americans" sense). It also spawned The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which would be enough to condemn any lesser film to Hell for all eternity on that basis alone.

Face it, if it's a science-fiction or action flick or tv show, and it's set on present-day Earth or the very near future, and it was made after 1999, it owes something to The Matrix. Buffy did a "Dodge this" gag that very fall, for crying out loud!

The (biggest) problem is, bullet time was created to visually show that yes, you can have superpowers in an unreal world. It's a disconnect that breaks the cardinal rule of camera work; you notice it. Putting bullet time in any film set in "the real world" and using it when mere mortals duke it out (God DAMN it, Watchmen!) cheapens the original intended effect and breaks the audience's suspension of disbelief. So nice job breaking it, every single hack who didn't get it.

(At this point I feel the need to direct your attention to the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact. Even though it's Aliens meets Moby-Dick, the music during the big pull-out from Picard's eye at the beginning is very, very similar to the music that plays when Neo wakes up in the power plant. And look at the implants on the back of the Borg Queen's neck. Just saying.)

Quotes from the rest of Inside Out

We have one very specific advantage over the majority of touring bands. The total inability of us to moonwalk, duckwalk, set fire to our hair or play guitars with our teeth means that the audience to not need a constant video monitor to show what we are doing on stage.

[When voting on which songs would appear on the final album, The Division Bell, Richard Wright voted his material 10 points and everyone else's zero], and it took David and me a while to work out why this new album was rapidly becoming a Rick Wright magnum opus. The voting system was placed under review, as we came up with various systems of electoral colleges and second preference votes that would hace graced any mayoral contest.

[When picking the list for the compilation album Echoes] we had to deal with the fact that Roger, like Rick before him, would only vote for his own tracks. God bless democracy.

At dinner one night, we agreed with Douglas [Adams] that if he came up with a name for the album that we liked, we would make a payment to the charity of his choice. He cogitated for a while and suggested The Division Bell. The real irritation was that it was a phrase contained within the existing lyrics: we really should have read them more carefully.

[On Live at Pompeii:] We later learnt that a lot of the paperwork relating to the film had been lost in a fire, proof, as I have learnt over the years, that offices of those handling such matters are prone to levels of self-immolation, flooding and invasion by locusts that even Old Testament prophets would have found unbelievable.

Brian [Humphries, Animals producer] never totally realised that among a band noted for their left-of-centre sensibilities, it was wiser to keep his own somewhat more right-wing views to himself, especially when Roger was in earshot.

While Brian was on a break, Roger and I had assumed engineering duties, and successfully erased David's recently completed guitar solo. This was a perfect moment for me to recognise Roger's seniority.

We were all aware of the arrival of punk - even anyone who didn't listen to the music could not have failed to notice the Sex Pistols' explosion into the media spotlight. Just in in case we had missed this, locked in our Britannia Row bunker, Johnny Rotten kindly sported a particularly fetching 'I hate Pink Floyd' T-shirt.

Although we could sympathise with [punk's sentiments towards the record industry's concentration on "dinosaur" legacy acts over new talent], we were, however, on the wrong side of the divide, as far as the punk generation were concerned. 'Of course, you don't want the world populated only with dinosaurs,' I said at the time, 'but it's a terribly good thing to keep some of them alive.'

[Nick got asked to produce a punk album by the Damned.] We finished the album, and mixed it in the time Pink Floyd would have taken to set up the microphones.

My week - a brief overview

In general I've tried to keep this blog updated at least once a day, even if those posts are stupid short. There was that thing at the beginning of the month where I was on vacation and didn't really feel like trying to access the internet in the land of modems that make snails look like cheetahs.

And then there was this week.

You saw some of the fruits of those labors in the travel story, terrible and totally draft-quality though it was. You will never ever see my Philosophy paper on Free Will because it's just that supremely horrible.

I've been constantly tired because I'm not getting enough sleep, and my throat is sore from some sort of nasty seasonal allergy I'm only just becoming aware of. And speaking of medical ailments...

Nah. Not going there today.

On the plus side I did get through the rest of Inside Out and I'll have a post tomorrow about all the other awesome quotes in that book.

Black Sabbath ruined metal?!

Not buying it. The reasoning is "they created it; they're the reason metal is what it is today." That's crap. That's like saying George Washington is responsible for the mess we find ourselves in today.

In other news, coming soon to this site: 10 Great Films that (Inadvertenty) Ruined Movies.

Shortest Post Evah!

Called it.

Edit 1:
Best part of the article:
Money men could wave a copy of the Black Album at metal bands young and old, and with a smirk drawl the words “Sound like this or be poor. The rules have changed.”

Edit 2:
So what's going to be Band #1? I was expecing Metallica to end up in that spot because let's face it, the Black Album killed metal. The MS guys said so themselves. I've offered up a few alternative culprits (G'n'R, Bruce Dickinson's horrible decision to leave Maiden right when grunge took off), but I sincerely doubut G'n'R or Maiden will crop up in spot #1. Ozzy might, for being a zombie-farce of himself, but that's a long shot. AC/DC aren't metal and even if they were, Back in Black begat Def Leppard, who, though they aren't really my cup of tea, aren't terrible either.

You know what? I'm going to guess Iron Maiden. The Number of the Beast proved that all you needed to generate controversy (read: media coverage, read: free publicity) is a reference to the Dark Prince. That alone unleashed a deluge of Satanic noise, and their decision to go synthy in 86 was comically ill-timed (yes, let's do a lighter album right when Master of Puppets, Peace Sells, and Reign in Blood are about to be unleashed). Did Seventh Son introduce concept albums to metal? I doubt it, but maybe they made them more mainstream. And Bruce leaving in 93 just when metal needed him most was a terrible mistake.

But in all honesty all of these reasons don't come close to what Metallica did. Whatever MS's choice is, I want to see them try to defend it.

On Air Travel

I haven't been yakking nearly as much as I want to because of school. I've decided to adapt (read: shamelessly recycle and partially censor) an essay I had to write earlier this week and share it with all one of you. All censorship has been bolded. Fill it in with the madlib of your choice. -James

Airports, as Douglas Adams once (in a book I read mostly in various airports, subsequently loaned to a friend, and haven’t seen in three years) put it much better than I can ever hope to, are generally ugly things. They really don’t want you to spend much time in them; get on your flight as quickly as possible, so that an arriving plane can then use that gate. You’d think the airlines would be a bit more cooperative, but no: delays and cancellations are still alarmingly commonplace. Once you’re through the security checkpoint and find out that your flight has been delayed, there are only so many options available to you.

What is an airport? A portmanteau of the word “air” and “port,” I suppose, much like seaport before it; a place where one gets on or off a vessel traveling through the air. It’s a far more accurate term for the age of zeppelins, but that’s the resiliency of the English language for you. Airports have basic features. There’s a check-in counter where you tell the agent who you are and they give you a ticket if you’ve bought one in advance. This process is being phased out, replaced by computers that spit out either your ticket or error messages telling you to go see the very gate agent whose job has been threatened by this new computer. If you haven’t bought a ticket in advance, you tell the agent where you want to go and the agent prints off a ticket after taking your money (I don’t believe the computers can do this yet; they can print tickets and take your money, to be sure, but they can’t seem to plan your route for you). If you’re carrying more than two bags, you’ll have to leave some of them with the agent, who will ensure that the bags get loaded onto the plane. And by that I mean the agent will put your bag on a conveyor belt and you’ll be happy if it lands where you’re going on the same day you do. There was an Italian airport I got stuck in at one point some years ago because the carrier cancelled our flight after taking our bags and refusing to give them back. They gave us accommodations for the night – an awful Italian hotel in the middle of a full-scale soccer riot with a thermostat even more uncooperative than the ones in my college’s dorms. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s a fantastically bad idea to check a bag.

After that, you go to the security checkpoint, which on average consists of fifteen minutes of standing in line, two minutes of hastily dragging your computer out of its bag and removing your shoes and belt and “any metallic objects you might be carrying,” five seconds of nervous anticipation as you step through the metal detector (now being replaced by what a friend of mine refers to as a “nudie scanner”), another minute of waiting for the guy behind the x-ray machine to stop staring at your bag – or worse, the bag right behind yours – so you can retrieve it, and one last minute of re-tying your shoelaces (I’ve since discovered the joys of loafers) and putting your keys back in your pocket and your computer back in your bag before you can be on your way.

It is vitally important to step into the scanner the moment your bags go into the x-ray machine. Usually one scanner will service two lines, and it’s entirely possible for well-coordinated thieves to rob you at the security checkpoint; one of them will wait for you to put your bags on the belt before entering the scanner. They’ll have lots of metallic objects in their pockets and set the thing off. While you’re waiting for them to empty their pockets, their accomplice will make off with your bags on the other side. This scam may not continue to work with the advent of the nudie scanners, and that’s the only good thing I can say about them. At any rate, once you’re past security, it’s invariably at least an hour until your flight, and you have no distractions except what the airport has to offer.

Before I get to what the airport has to offer (spoiler alert: very little), a word on the ideal dress code for travelers; unless it’s the middle of winter, my advice is a polo shirt, khakis, loafers, and a sweater you can stick in your bag as soon as you get on the plane (for men; I’m unqualified to give fashion advice to women). I’ve already mentioned that the loafers will save you time at security. Khaki pants have deeper pockets than jeans, so if you’re not wearing a sport coat with deep pockets, you’ll have somewhere to put your ticket without folding it up. Airports and airplanes tend to be clean enough that you shouldn’t worry about getting some fairly nice clothes dirty, but I wouldn’t advise wearing a suit unless you’re on your way to a meeting.

The airport I’ve spent the most time in, by virtue of having parents who like scheduling flights into and out of it, is Chicago’s own O’Hare International Airport, named after a World War Two pilot who got shot down after taking out five German stukas. Before that, the airport was called Orchard Field, and the luggage tags still read ORD. The airport is named after a guy whose plane went down. To me, that seems like tempting fate. O’Hare has got some of the best distractions in the airport business, including a Brachiosaur fossil they had to take out of the Field Museum of Natural History to make room for Sue the T-rex. Unfortunately, they put the skeleton directly behind the security checkpoint, which is an awful place for a decoration that old; people are eager to put their shoes back on and bustle off to their gates, not look up at the remains of the ancient beast.

There’s an impressive light show above the moving walkways used to ferry passengers underneath the tarmac to another terminal. In fact, somewhat appropriately, O’Hare’s entire theme when it comes to décor appears to be “look up!” There’s not another airport I can name that actually puts interesting displays on or near its ceiling. Elsewhere in the airport, you can find a massive globe suspended in the air (it gets decorated with a wreath when Christmas comes around), and a corridor with ceiling tiles that slowly go through the entire rainbow as you get further away from the security checkpoint. I wonder why the airport was built with ceiling heights more appropriate for a cathedral. Again, a general “look up” theme appears to be the answer. The airport is large enough that it took several trips for me to deem it sufficiently explored.

Airport food is uniformly miserable. They have McDonald’s and the like, and they also have more formal restaurants, but it could just be the stale air that makes everything taste like travel food, and that’s really no fun. The bottled water always tastes like tap water, whereas no-one will bat an eye if you fill up an empty water bottle using a drinking fountain. The Cyril E. King airport in island recently removed the drinking fountain inside their terminal and jacked up the price of bottled water; someone’s catching on. Also, it’s often difficult to find a spot to sit at any of these restaurants, because they’re all full of people who are, like you, waiting for their delayed flight to finally board.

Actually, compared to the alternative, waiting for a delayed flight isn’t all that bad. I was once on a trip from island to Chicago, with a layover in Orlando. The first leg of the flight got delayed; the plane that was supposed to take me from Orlando to Chicago was boarding at the same time that the plane taking me from island to Orlando was touching down. I ran, watching the gate numbers slowly march towards 35, my gate… except that I was suddenly looking at 34, 33, 32. My mind wasn’t exactly functioning, but that airport’s layout doesn’t seem particularly sensible either. I got as far as 28 before I realized that I’d made a mistake. There’s a dark and poorly-marked corridor leading to gates 35 and 36 that I completely missed. The map of the terminal that I’d studied before the first flight had landed displayed nothing like this. I can’t say that the airport in Orlando has particularly endeared itself to me. Nor have the people responsible for printing accurate diagrams of the airports in the back of the airline’s magazines. I did make that flight, but only just barely.

Getting to the gate has only been a problem for me only that once, and there were extenuating circumstances. Usually, the issue has nothing to do with me getting to the gate on time. Once I get to the gate, I routinely discover that the flight’s departure time has been pushed back fifteen minutes, then thirty minutes, then an hour. Joseph Daniel argues that these delays are due to airport congestion; there aren’t enough gates to accommodate the busy schedules of modern airlines. But this proposal is incomplete. Airport congestion has very little to do with delays caused by random equipment failure that the airline staff always seems to be completely incapable of fixing on their own.

One of the most idiotic situations I’ve ever found myself in involves United Airlines, or as I have taken to calling them, Blighted United. We were coming back from visiting a family member in some state on the East Coast, and our flight was delayed for an hour. Then it was cancelled. The reason for this cancellation? Some part of the plane we were to use had malfunctioned, and a replacement part would need to be flown in from San Francisco. This was United Airlines, a major travel industry, not some dime-store company that only owns twenty planes; was it unreasonable of me to expect them to have replacement parts less than five hours away? As it happened, a Southwest flight to Chicago was leaving from the gate across the aisle. We got the last seats. Congestion had nothing to do with this debacle.

More grating is the way United handled the crisis. By watching the gate agent carefully, my father was able to predict that the flight would be cancelled more than twenty minutes before it was officially announced. The agent was always either conversing with an engineer or calling his superiors. Said superiors naturally decided to take a “the buck stops over there” approach to solving the problem, and the agent began calling hotels, because that was the last flight of the evening and it is against United’s policy to re-book its passengers on other airlines. This guy knew, for a good twenty minutes, that our flight wasn’t going to leave and if his bosses had anything to say about it, we wouldn’t go anywhere that night. There were two flights to Chicago that started boarding in that first one-hour window; if he’d announced the flight was cancelled earlier, more people other than just the clever and observant ones could have gotten home that day. But no. This situation had nothing to do with any congestion anywhere down the line. Number-crunchers like Joseph Daniel fail to account for the general incompetence that can at times seem to pervade the airline industry. Instead, a simple JSTOR search of the terms “airport” and “waiting” reveal essay after essay discussing ways to relieve the bottleneck of passengers with pricing schemes and other and other options aimed at “fixing” the passengers, when in fact the airline is at fault.

That was an example of the rare occasion when I was able to follow the drama behind a flight delay. Most of the time, I, like all my fellow travelers, get left to my own devices. In the section on the security checkpoint I mentioned taking a laptop out of my bag, and indeed the archaic instrument on which I’m typing this essay has been my one constant companion on all my travels for the past eight years. My computer’s batteries stopped holding a charge in an airport. I turned it on and started working on an essay (this was back in high school; it is not my intention to imply that I’ve maintained the habit of doing any schoolwork on vacation, because this is supposed to be a nonfiction class). I’d made sure the charge was full before I left, but it was still only about five minutes before the computer informed me that it had about five minutes of battery life left, so maybe it would be a good idea to save my work and shut it down. Without a computer to sustain my nearly-ADD-like demands for constant entertainment, I found myself investigating the airport’s library. I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve bought in an airport bookstore and actually finished. Once that plane finally lands and I get home, the book gets buried. Nevertheless, when a flight gets delayed, the bookstore’s usually the first place I go. My philosophy is that anything’s better than just sitting around, staring at an ugly airport wall.

At one point when I was in grade school, my family took a trip down to island with a layover in other island, where we found that our flight to island was cancelled. We wound up splitting our party up and taking three separate planes for the last thirty minutes of the trip. The layover ended up being something like five hours. I was, thankfully, still in my Pokemon phase (I cannot believe I just wrote that), and so, with a copious supply of batteries and yet another virtual cave to navigate, I passed the time continually stumbling down the same dead-end corridors.

These days when my plane gets delayed, I find myself wandering down real-life dead end corridors instead of virtual ones (there are far fewer bats in real life). There’s usually something worth finding, somewhere. My sister now attends college in Tennessee, and when our flight back from there was delayed, I wandered around looking at all the guitars in display cases. They have an obsession with Telecasters and Les Pauls, which makes sense given the country music scene in Nashville. In Heathrow, London, undeniably the worst airport I’ve ever been in, wandering is the only option; rarely are there even seats at the gate. The American Airlines terminal at Bradley International in Connecticut is a horribly boring affair; the gates are all arrayed around a large square room just after security, so there’s nowhere to wander. The upside is that you can get a nice view of the airplanes out on the tarmac going about their business, which evidently involves anything except taking you home.

So other than play video games, read a book, or wander around, what options are available to the traveler with too much time on his or her hands? Sleep is always an option. Jet-lag can kill more vacation plans than anything else except sickness (and it does a very good job of exacerbating that). Yes, the chairs in the gates are incredibly uncomfortable, which does make sleeping difficult. Talking to random strangers is always an option. After all, if they’re on your flight then they’re putting up with the exact same nonsense as you are. Of course, they might just complain that they’re horribly bored and stuck in an airport for the next two hours.

Great quotes from the first 70 pages of Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd by Nick Mason

"Although he had studiously ignored my existence up until that moment, Roger [Waters] had finally recognized in me a kindred musical sprity trapped within a budding architect's body. The star-crossed paths of Virgo and Aquarius had dictated our destiny, and were compelling Roger to seek a way to unite our minds in a great creative adventure.
No, no, no. I'm trying to keep the invention to a minimum. The only reason Roger had bothered to approach me was that he wanted to borrow my car."

"The fact that none of us [Mason's first band, the Hotrods] knew how to play was only a minor setback, since we didn't have any instruments."

"Although we [the Hotrods again] had access to some amps, these were so shameful that when we posed for a group photo, we felt obliged to mock up a Vox cabinent using a cardboard box and a biro."

"In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd [Barrett] was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me."

"The wallflowers, who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country and vandalizing the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on."

"Acquiring a van represented by far the biggest capital outlay - yet had none of the glamor of spending a student grant on a new guitar or bass drum."

A penny for my thoughts, adjusted for inflation

Back on November 4, 2008, I wrote an essay about how the lyrics to a 20-year-old metal song had never seemed more appropriate. I really should find it, because I'm sure it's still somewhere on my hard drive, and post it here one of these days, because I'm still convinced that I am being and will be vindicated.

But I was wrong. Metallica's "...And Justice For All" was certainly appropriate then, but it's even more appropriate now. All you need to do is chance the title to "...And Healthcare For All."

Some of the lyrics are on the painfully juvenile side (whenever I think about it, Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," with its line about trading cold comfort for change, best sums up current political events), but "Justice" is still more relevant today than it ever was in 88. Lines like "Halls of justice painted green, money talking" and "seeking no truth, winning is all," and "the ultimate in vanity/exploiting their supremacy" still ring true today.

Some questions:

1) Does Bart Stupak honestly believe that the most pro-abortion president in history will do everything in his power to make sure our tax dollars don't fund abortions?

2) Does the government really have the right to force its citizens to purchase a good or service?

3) Does any Democrat understand what "insurance" actually is? What's next, forcing fire insurance companies to sell insurance coverage to people whose houses are already on fire?

This thing is an albatross around the Democrats' neck for the next few election cycles, but it's concrete sneakers for America in general.

I can't believe the things you say. I can't believe the price you'll pay.

"If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson

It's just a rock band.

"It's just natural. It's not a great disaster. People keep talking about it as if it's the end of the Earth. It's only a rock group that split up. It's nothing important. You know, you have all the old records there if you want to reminisce."
-John Lennon

Yeah, that pretty much covers it. Over and out.

Why AC/DC Aren't Metal (And Furthermore Never Were)

The liner notes to Back in Black, written by some journalist, say "Heavy metal nation knows these riffs by heart." True, Metalheads everywhere were at one point eager to point to the #2 biggest selling album of all time and say "Yes, that's a metal album." Who wouldn't?

Anyway, let's take a look at some of the things that define metal:

1) Satan (or Cthulhu). Unless you think "Highway to Hell" and "Hell Ain't A Bad Place to Be" are meant to be taken literally, the Prince of Darkness is rather absent from the AC/DC canon. Oh, he's mentioned in "Hells Bells," true. But come on, "The Number of the Beast" is more satanic than "Hells Bells," and "Beast" is about a Nathaniel Hawthorne story.

2) Leather. Big no (Bon had a leather outfit in the early days, but that was gone by Let There Be Rock). Angus Young has somehow managed to look more dignified in a school suit than anybody who man wore leather pants, with the possible exception of Jim Morrison.

3) Lyrics: AC/DC have never written a song that wasn't about sex, drugs, or rock & roll except for the few that are about Bon's death. That's not to say that metal bands can't cover those topics, but those that do tend to wear leather. See entry #2 on this list.

3a) Songs about war or violence: Er, aside from "War Machine" on their latest album, I'm going with zero. "Hells Bells" is a maybe.

4) Technical perfection. Going back to Back in Black for a moment, the second-biggest-selling album of all time, listen carefully to Malcolm's guitar during the intro to "Hells Bells" and Angus flubbing the very first note of "Shoot to Thrill." No metal band (especially no metal band hinging their entire career on that album) would leave those mistakes in.