Random Musings

Saving Private Ryan on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day

June 7, 2014 1 Comment

Watched Saving Private Ryan in honor of the 70th anniversary of D-Day yesterday. I still remember when I first saw this in the theater. I live in a retirement area with a huge senior population.When we went to see this the theater was full, and it was a sea of white heads in every aisle. My wife and I were some of the only young people there. It was harrowing. That opening sequence, no one had ever done anything like it before. For 20 minutes you’re assaulted with graphic violence and noise and fury that relentlessly pounded your senses. By the end of the sequence, you were out of breath and tired of being battered and just wishing for a break from the sensory overload. The result was that for the rest of the movie,…
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Films, Random Musings

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Why Nirvana Was Important (To Me)

April 14, 2014 1 Comment

There is a segment of music fandom that say Nirvana is overrated. They’re probably not wrong. The band got catapulted into sainthood on the strength of a small catalog, albeit a pretty great one, and a metric ton of media hype. Their status as deities is perhaps overblown, even if they were briefly great. Still, some among the naysayers also say they don’t get why people connected with Cobain. They say his lyrics were mostly strung together nonsense (true) and his songs were simple rips on Pixies and Beatles melodies (also true). So why the hell did anyone connect with this junkie? For me, I can point to two small music moments that exemplify what it was that bored under my skin. The first was…
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Music, Random Musings

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I have recorded 15 years of noisy, droning, m2 music

October 14, 2013 0 Comments

For 15 years, I have recorded noisy, droning music under the name m2. Okay, it’s actually been longer than that. Recording music of this sort long pre-dated the m2 project. It even pre-dated owning a four-track recorder. I used to own one of those old twin-deck cassette stereos with a turntable on top. One day I discovered that if you plugged headphones into the mic jack and dubbed a tape from one deck to the other, you could kinda sorta play with the tape and have it record layers on top of one another. It was messy and ugly, but it worked. You could layer music. So I promptly took a cassette I had — I remember what it was, too; a dub of R.E.M….
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Music, Random Musings

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Guess I’m supposed to be blogging about stuff

June 28, 2013 1 Comment

Blogs are like great weights affixed to your neck, or rather, like a 200-pound sets of car keys. You don’t want to carry the damn things around, but the car won’t start without them. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here. Probably should have stayed current. Should have been updating all along. Could have talked about this project or that, or merely talked about James Gandolfini passing away and why Bruce Springsteen is probably better than I give him credit for and why the Akira manga is crazy good. Yet the truth is, I’d rather be working on new projects than talking about them. The other truth is, even though it’s seen as your authorial duty to plug your upcoming books or whatever else…
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Random Musings, Rants, Writing

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Why journalists hate their life, redux

December 13, 2012 0 Comments

A few days ago I shared why journalists hate life, namely, the sheer ineptitude of management that seems hellbent on driving papers to extinction, kicking employee morale in the face while doing it. This is an industry-wide problem that is killing newsroom after newsroom and making reporters, frankly, not really give a damn about their job anymore. Well, here’s another story, courtesy of KC Confidential: The Kansas City Star has told reporters Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann that one of them has to leave the paper, and they — not management — have to decide who goes. “Dillon has seniority, so she has the option of taking it or not taking it,” says a KCConfidential.com source. “And if she does, Dawn gets laid off. Dawn’s…
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Random Musings, Rants, Uncategorized

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