Wis[s]e Words

Metal Monday: Dooomed

Published on July 12, 20101 Comment

What better way than to work through the disappointment and frustration of losing the Worldcup final, the late breaking news that Harvey Pekar has died as well as more personally, having S. back in hospital yet again, than with some slit your wrists Doom Metal? Luckily we’re on the “P” in the metal alphabet, which stands for Paradise Lost and there’s nothing more Doom Metal than them. Like so many of my other favourites I discovered them in the late eighties and early nineties. They were the first band I know that was so heavy and slow, that didn’t attempt to pack as much sound in as small a time as possible, but extended their music, slowed it down, while dropping the usually high pitched vocals an octave or so lower. The end result is a type of metal that saps your strength, slows down your heart beat and turns you inside. No quick adrenaline rush here, but you do get a rebound in energy from their songs, much like a collapsing star can get a gravitational rebound when it crosses a certain limit…

Below are some of my favourite Paradise Lost songs.

True Belief:

Embers Fire:

As I Die:

P also stands for Pestilence, another great Dutch Death Metal band, but they didn’t really fit my mood today. Some other time.

Goddammit

Published on July 11, 20101 Comment

Third time unlucky. Dammit. Crap, crap final and Holland choking once again. It’s nice for Spain to finally win a tournament but dammit we deserved more. For some reason the team never got into the game however and so the Spanish won. It’s sad but nothing to be done about it. It’s just rotten icing on the shit cake that the Spanish goal came out of an offside situation.

Oh well. There’s always the European Championships in 2012.

To be honest I’m not too cut up about it, but that’s largely because a) I never really believed in it and b) S. was taken into hospital again earlier this week so I’ve been a bit pre-occupied.

Eighty Years War revisited

Published on July 10, 2010

If Holland wins the final tomorrow, will we be singing “one war of independence and one Worldcup”? I think, like me, most of us here started this tournament with some optimism but no great expectations after what had happened in 2008. In the European Championship Oranje started brilliant, defeating both France and Italy with devastating ease, but flamed out early against Russia. At the start of the Worldcup therefore I thought we would make it out of the group phase but was unsure about anything else. As Oranje kept winning and winning I started to hope, but I still don’t believe we will actually win tomorrow…. I want it so bad though I can taste it and with me the entire country — over twelve million people watched the semi-final out of a population of sixteen million.

Dirk Kuijt

And if we do it’s in no small part due to Dirk Kuijt, one of the hardest working men in the squad, somebody who was taken for granted before the finals and who was called on to be replaced by one of the “big four”: Robin van Persie, Wesley Sneijder, Rafael van der Vaart and Arjen Robben. Those were the supposedly best attackers in the squad, and if Kuijt was sacrifised than they could all play together. Fortunately Bert van Marwijk remained loyaal to Kuijt and he kept his place, proving his worth on several occasions. Kuijt worked hard in both attack and defence, scoring once and giving several assists, also helping save at least one goal that cou;d’ve knocked Holland out of the tournament. He’s a hard worker and completely unselfish, a good footballer but not one who has the kind of talent and skills to not have to work at it. Where van Persie is brilliant enough just to need one single moment to determine a game, Kuijt has to make the effort the full ninety minutes to do the same. He’s the type of footballer I like the most, a true Feijenoord player.

If Kuijt makes us champions of the world, the Dutch team will get a triumphant tour through the canals of Amsterdam — houseboat owners are already panicking. If it was a myth that several houseboats sank back in 1988 when Oranje became European champions, it came pretty close as the video above shows. If they win, they will arrive in Amsterdam on Tuesday and some two million people are expected to show their appreciation. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be there, whether or not I can be there, but it would be a moment to never forget…

Pushing the envelope only results in papercuts

Published on July 9, 2010

Two comments by Jonathan M. from this thread at Torque Control brutally taken out of context:

I must admit to not understanding a) why one would write stuff that didn’t consciously push the envelope

[…]

I think that ‘pushing the envelope’ is a more useful term than avantgarde simply as a short-hand way of saying “don’t do what other people are doing”. Which is kind of a mantra for the postmodern age.

I always thought the essence of our postmodern age was the realisation that everything had been done and said already and worse, it is all still available at the click of a button, legally or otherwise on the internets. It’s pointless trying to go for the shock of the new, because there is nothing so new as to be shocking anymore; it’s a mug’s game.

New things are not in themselves more interesting than old ideas done well. Nobody will ever be surprised much by a new Terry Pratchett novel, yet I so much rather have him do several more Discworld books than attempting something novel. There’s a pleasure in seeing a familiar concept being done well.

Zeitgeist

Published on July 8, 2010

Drive your rightwing friends even more batty: Nixon was worried about climate change:

Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public’s attention.

And again: Reagan was kind of a wuss compared to the wingnut fantasy version of him:

In fact, Reagan was terrified of war. He took office eager to vanquish Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and its rebel allies in El Salvador, both of which were backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. But at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion “scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan,” according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley. “Those sons of bitches won’t be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua,” Reagan told chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein near the end of his presidency, “and I’m not going to do it.”

Continuing our theme, the epic tale of when Terry Savage met a free lemonade stand shows that when it comes to political correctness even the most uptight liberal leftwinger has nothing on the wingnut right:

“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

Imagine having to live this way, of having to determine of anything you do whether or not it’s properly capitalist or backsliding deviantism and worse, having to do this not just for yourself, but for anybody you meet?

Some quick links to end the day: