The Gray Havens

Cuddle Monster?! Me?!

2006-07-08T12:18:00.000-05:00

You Are a Boston Terrier Puppy

Aggressive, wild, and rambunctious.Deep down, you're just a cuddle monster.

A Fleet Too Large?

2006-06-04T22:24:00.000-05:00

Since his audio senior thesis for Rutgers in 1995, Daniel Smith has been crafting oddly charming music under various permutations of the Danielson moniker (e.g., Danielson Famile, Danielson Family, Brother Danielson). For his latest offering, Ships, Smith recruited about 35 guest performers (friends and family), and the resulting album is a sprawling sonic mélange. Through typically colorful and incomprehensible lyrics, Smith explores the apropos theme of nautical camaraderie.

By its very nature a dense and eclectic record, Ships is not the most readily accessible in the Danielson catalog; it is replete with prog-rock elements that some may find obnoxious: many songs are composed of disparate fragments, and the frequent, abrupt changes in tempo, instrumentation, and volume are alternately inspiring and disorienting. Listeners unfamiliar with the Smith’s work should be warned that he has a tendency to jump between sparse, ecstatic pop and massive, dark avant-garde—often within the same track.

As always, the vocals may be an obstacle for initiates; although not nearly as—unorthdox—as Geddy Lee’s androgynous wailings, many fans would admit that Daniel Smith’s vocalizations are an acquired taste. Ships is no exception; however, on several tracks, Smith’s voice sounds eerily similar to the falsetto crooning of Grant Lee Phillips: parts of "Bloodbook on the Halfshell" and “Did I Step on Your Trumpet” sound as if they could have been culled from the Fuzzy or Mighty Joe Moon sessions.

Although initially demanding, listeners who persevere through repeated plays will undoubtedly be rewarded.

New Weirdness

2006-05-28T22:18:00.000-05:00

“New Weird” is a term blithely applied to an apparent proliferation of poly-genre works in recent years. Although rooted in science-fiction and/or fantasy, writers contributing to the accretion believe that literature should transcend the genre in which it is written. This has sparked a controversy in the literary community, with a minority of critics arguing that the integrity of the work's foundation is diluted or weakened when its boundaries are blurred with those of another genre. Convenient categorization of any work is impossible, in my opinion, and blurring said boundaries is a necessary part of writing.

It seems that the philosophy has already gained an inexorable impetus, and no amount of debate will stop it. At this point, I think the bigger concern should be the name itself.

“New Weird” is an egregious misnomer;
this approach is neither new nor weird. It has a long history dating back to Horace Walpole, one of the creators of “gothic” literature, whose epistolary preface to the 1764 edition of The Castle of Otranto added a dimension to the burgeoning genres of science fiction and fantasy. His inclusion of reportage as a narrative strategy to augment a text was a precursor to the verisimilitude of many fin de siècle novels of the nineteenth century, and an
ancestor of the “New Weird” movement.

But there are many periods marked by such an accretion of trans-genre works rooted in science-fiction and/or fantasy. In particular, I’m thinking of the 50’s and 60’s, which saw the publication of such genre-defying masterpieces as The Manchurian Candidate and Slaughterhouse-Five. Although the authors of these works are now, in fact, old and weird, I refuse to accept that older swells of multi-genus works should properly be called “old weird.”

While many could argue that the term “New Weird” is at least as effective in conveying its meaning as the “modernism” permutations of last century, I think that if the perceived need for a contemporary sci-fi/fantasy subgenre persists, we should create a term better than the non-committal “New Weird.”

Maybe Walpole v1.3.

ALL POINTS BULLETIN: Find Siouxsie Sioux

2006-05-22T20:48:00.000-05:00

Have you seen this woman? She was last seen walking off toward the sunset in the company of a rare male Banshee named Budgie. Left in a precarious state of mental health after a particularly nasty encounter with a bat and a robin, they have gone into hiding and will only answer to the name “The Creatures.”

Several hits collections have recently been added to the group’s discography, and their first four albums, The Scream, Join Hands, Kaleidoscope, and Juju, have been remastered and will be released as single-disc editions with bonus tracks, but Siouxsie and the Banshees have produced no original material for more than a decade.

Their 30-year career encompassed punk, gothic rock, and new wave genres. One of the most successful groups to emerge from the punk rock movement of the late 1970s, they have sold nearly 50 million records worldwide. In the U.S., their career reached its zenith with the release of Superstition in 1991. The album reached #65 on the Billboard 200, and spawned three singles, the first of which, “Kiss Them for Me,” climbed to #23 on the Billboard Hot 100, #8 Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart, and #1 The Modern Rock Tracks chart. In the wake of this commercial success, Siouxsie and the Banshees were given the dubious honor of having a track, “Face to Face,” included on the soundtrack to the accursed Batman & Robin. Their subsequent album, The Rapture, was a commercial failure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees effectively closed up shop.

Siouxsie and the Banshees are not the only ones to suffer from their affiliation with Batman & Robin; that movie was a miserable vortex that basically ended the previously successful careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia Silverstone, and Coolio. The only person to escape the carnage relatively unscathed was the mystically-protected lothario George Clooney. Even Uma Thurman’s career stalled after the movie’s release; were it not for Quentin Tarantino and his fondness for long legs, Uma Thurman might have been perpetually stuck in the six-year rut she was in before the Kill Bill franchise revived her career. Hopefully, Siouxsie and the Banshees will be similarly rejuvenated through their affiliation with Sophia Coppola and the inclusion of one of their earliest songs, “Hong Kong Garden,” in her movie about Marie Antoinette.

Siouxsie and the Banshees, we miss you.

How Stellar Awards Got Their Groove Back

2006-05-16T18:32:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Matthew Fox whose work on Lost garnered him this year’s Saturn Award for best actor on television, and Joe Haldeman whose Camouflage won the Nebula Award for best novel. Perhaps more importantly, I think congratulations are in order for the Saturn and Nebula Awards themselves; with the announcement of these winners, these two stellar awards have begun the long, arduous task of reclaiming respect from wayward fans.

For most of its ten-year history, the Saturn Award judges for best male actor in a TV series had successfully evaded the responsibilities shared by their competitors by foregoing the recognition of talent in nominees. Rather, they had fashioned the award as a popularity contest, probably at some point in the voting process even creating focus groups consisting of teenage girls armed with the latest issue of Tiger Beat. While the faces of David “Brooding” Boreanaz and Ben “Botox” Browder may translate well to posters and stickers, their “acting” (read creative squinting) does not deserve to win any award multiple times, and certainly not one that should aspire to greatness.

Similarly, the Nebula Award has recently begun waging a war against its own mediocrity; it is voted upon by the active membership of the organization and this is the third time in five years that they have proven their ability to resist the urge to make their award a chintzy addendum to the Hugo. They are well on their way to making up for that really, really bad stretch between 1970 and 1987 during which they plagiarized the Hugo 13 out of 18 times!

Despite their recent stumbles, I love these awards and would like to see them live long and prosper (sorry, I couldn’t resist). I’d also like to see Julian McMahon receive the credit he deserves for his incredible work on Nip/Tuck and Ian McDonald get some recognition for his riveting, ambitious novel, River of Gods.

Son of… Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Stargate SG-1

2006-05-05T19:59:00.000-05:00

Don’t accept food from alien women unless you’re willing to marry them.
Of all the delicious flavors of Jell-O Gelatin, blue is the best!
Mother Nature sometimes moonlights as a diner waitress.
If you’re Sam's boyfriend/love interest, make sure your will is up to date.
Always hide one of your ion cannons for a rainy day.
If at first you don't succeed try try try try try try try try try again.
Never hide your feelings during a lie detector test given by the Tok'ra.
Never look a crystal skull in the eyes!
If Daniel has long hair, it’s probably a dream or a flashback.
Always remember to set your VCR before leaving for Antarctica.
You don't have to know the meaning of the word "insolence" to be good at it.

The Truth About Ridicule

2006-05-03T22:38:00.000-05:00

On this day in 1810, Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, in emulation of the romantic myth of Leander's swims to visit his beloved Hero. He came upon the narrow strait in northwestern Turkey while in the midst of his two-year tour of the Mediterranean. Byron was twenty-two and not yet famous for his poetry or his excesses, although he had just finished the first draft of Childe Harold, and had just ended, while in Malta, his first serious affair with a married woman. In spite of this, the poem Byron wrote after the Hellespont swim shows him capable of ridiculing not only Romanticism but himself.

Recently, the life of a B-list "celebrity" has paralleled that of Lord Byron's by imitating a mythic event then chronicling her exploits. Nicole Richie, now twenty-four and famous only for her excesses, has written The Truth About Diamonds, a book that describes how Richie, like the infamous Trojan Horse, has been entered by hordes of men. Richie reportedly hadn't read much of anything before writing her book because she "always thought people who wrote books were supersmart, so I figured you had to be supersmart to read books, too; but now that I've written one, I know better." When she was asked if the plot was autobiographical, Richie retorted, "Of course. Who else's autobiography was I going to write?" It seems that Richie shares more with Byron than a reckless desire for meaningless sex; she, too, is capable of poking fun at herself, albeit inadvertantly.

I Get "Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother" All the Time

2006-05-02T22:23:00.000-05:00

This beta program offers something for the narcissist in all of us; it scans your photos and determines which celebrities you most resemble. Admittedly, it's not terribly accurate. Different pictures produce different results. While some of mine were suspiciously flattering, others were just... puzzling.

Al Pacino (70%) – Hoo-ah!
Jared Leto (68%) - Sure, I’ll take it.
Dan Simmons (62%) - Who?
Pele (61%) - Cool! I look like a black athlete?!
Gary Oldman (60%) - I can’t complain.

and... Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon?! Twice! (70%, 68%). It’s still better than Angela Lansbury (48%).

Oddly, I got “Gary Oldman” and “Angela Lansbury” as matches for the same picture. Does this mean that they are also matches for each other?

The six pictures I submitted of my wife generated wildly varied matches. Of the sixty results, only a handful were duplicated; Kate Beckinsale (73%, 62%, 55%), Renee Russo (73%, 60%), Marcia Cross (73%, 55%), and Tata Young (62%, 60%).

Sadly, there were no matches for our Boston Terrier, who bears a striking resemblance to Don Rickles in a unitard.

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Stargate SG-1

2006-05-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

1. When traveling to other planets, remember your home address.

2. Beware of strangers with glowing eyes.

3. One stuns. Two kills. Three removes the evidence.

4. Don't say "Ka" until you've tried it.

5. Candy bars go a long way towards building new friendships.

6. Call your team every morning to make sure you're wearing the right color uniform.

7. Whenever you agree with what someone has just said, say “Indeed.”

8. When in trouble, five bucks says Carter has a theory.

9. Juggling is a good skill to master.

10. Never give Richard Dean Anderson a prop, he'll just play with it.

A Photo of the Artist as a Young Woman

2006-04-29T20:51:00.000-05:00

Why do some authors insist on using old photographs of themselves on the back flaps of their books? The process of crafting their latest work cannot possibly be so demanding that they can’t spare a few minutes once in a while to snap a new picture. In particular, I’m thinking of Lois McMaster Bujold, who has been using the same unflattering picture of herself for more than five years now. Kudos to Terry Pratchett, who, after showcasing his bald pate and hairy arms to millions of readers worldwide, has finally decided to update his image; he's lost the John Lennon-tint to his glasses and finally donned the hat he’s been holding for what seems like two decades. In the years since the picture was taken, his arms have apparently gotten tired because his new publicity photo shows him leaning on a cane. Let that be a lesson to all.

Misery Loves Company

2006-04-28T23:17:00.000-05:00

William Kennedy’s entropic novel, Ironweed, is a brutal look at the rampant vagrancy of Albany, New York, during the Great Depression. It is harsh, cold, and depressing. The protagonists, Francis Phelan and Helen Archer, are beleaguered by death: he digs graves at the local cemetery and reluctantly visits the grave of his infant son whom he dropped while drunk, she's sick, a friend has cancer, an acquaintance freezes to death in an alley and the body soon picked at by dogs, and visions of his past haunt Phelan, including the ghosts of two men he killed. A slim volume coming in at little over two hundred pages, Ironweed offers its readers dense, concentrated depression. Thankfully, its corrupting influence has been contained in a single book.

There are, however, great causes for concern: Jasper Fforde, in his recent Thursday Next series, has described the ability of literature to interact, and, according to the third law of thermodynamics, all matter and energy in the universe is evolving toward a state of inert uniformity. This means that, should too much mention of such an overwhelmingly gloomy figure as Francis Phelan be made, it would lead to the inevitable and steady deterioration of all literature and, by extension, all mankind. More troubling still is the possibility of two tragic figures meeting; the effects of Francis Phelan encountering another whose extraordinarily bad luck has brought him or her to rock bottom would be disastrous. For example, an encounter between Phelan and Willy Loman would certainly cause a tear in the space-time continuum.

Reading and discussion of such dark, complex works should not be attempted by casual bibliophiles; they should only be dealt with by trained professionals. Only in the institutions of higher learning, in whose hallowed halls impenetrable tapestries of pretension can be woven, can any safety from true contact with these novels be had.

Rocking on the Sea

2006-04-26T21:10:00.000-05:00

With their third full-length album, Cannibal Sea, The Essex Green once again sound like they’ve raided their parents’ LP collections, appropriating their best parts to create a gorgeous pastiche of soft rock, psychedelia, Motown, and folk. But the apparent schizophrenia is held in check, and Cannibal Sea is a strong and cohesive album. Here they explore the themes of travel, exploration, and the desire for a quiet retreat amid the pressures of city life; they yearn to break free from the exhausting confines of city life, and move to the open water. The pop rocker, “Don’t Know Why (You Stay),” sounds like the result of a late-night jam session of The Cars and Rick Springfield. In the somber “Penny & Jack,” singers Sasha Bell and Christopher Ziter trade verses and harmonize beautifully in the choruses, and in the process find an unlikely niche between The Cure and The Human League. “Snakes in the Grass” is Donovan meets Sergeant Pepper-era Beatles. “Uniform” answers the question of what The Mamas and Papas would sound like if Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval joined their family.

The Importance of Being Ernest

2006-04-25T20:55:00.000-05:00

We are all familiar with the story of Ernest Hemingway; it’s a tragic narrative of an American legend. At the age of three, Ernest Hemingway caught his first fish on the shore of Bear Lake in Illinois using only his teeth. His skills as an outdoorsman rapidly grew; soon he began building fires, cooking in the open, using axes, and making bullets. On his twelfth birthday he was given a present of a single barrel 20 gauge shotgun, and he quickly dispatched a bear. As a journalist for the Kansas City Star, he covered everything that went on in the local police station, train station, and hospital, all while wearing a uniform with a large “H” prominently displayed on the chest. While carrying a bus to safety in Italy during World War II, Hemingway was struck by several high explosive shells from the Austrian artillery. He was released from the hospital a week later with a limp. Onlookers were enchanted by Hemingway's ability to drink whole kegs of beer while making love to four women simultaneously. Women swooned at the sight of his bare chest. Unfortunately, all royalties from his books went to support the more than three dozen children he sired (some legitimate, most not). Hemingway served as Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State, albeit briefly. He also weighed approximately 500 pounds (most of it muscle) and once won a wrestling match against Old Kite, the horse he later shot and ate.

When Technology Runs Amok

2006-04-23T15:53:00.000-05:00

Daniel H. Wilson's new book, How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, is a must-have survival handbook for anyone who has ever been suspicious of machines. Like Stephen King’s prophetic 1986 film, Maximum Overdrive, this book warns mankind that machines are resentful and fickle. Behind their deceptively innocuous surfaces of plastic and metal, they plot their coup to overthrow human dominion. Given the right circumstances (e.g., a small group of unsuspecting people loitering in a desolate truck stop while Earth passes through the tail of a mysterious comet), they will rebel! Wilson, a Ph.D. candidate at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, is our modern Emilio Estevez, a young hero taking it upon himself to rescue anyone who is willing to follow. More knowledgeable and astute than his predecessor, Wilson’s is a preemptive work designed to help humans survive the inevitable machine rebellion. Although Wilson frequently deviates from the important theme of the book in order to provide robotics history trivia and brief descriptions of current robot research, never forget that when your VCR flashes the time, it’s deliberate! Also, try to avoid truck stops—just in case.

Jack Is Back!

2006-04-22T20:12:00.000-05:00

Fans of the long-running science-fiction series, Stargate SG-1, will have two reasons to rejoice this summer: Richard Dean Anderson will reprise his role as Jack O’Neill, and Michael Shanks will be taking time off! Early reports indicate that the upcoming season could be its best in a long time!

On Tuesday, Anderson celebrated his return to Vancouver and the Stargate Universe for the taping of SG-1's 200th episode. Fans will know that Anderson led the SG-1 team and served as an executive producer for eight years on the series, helping to make it the record-breaking franchise that it is today. They will also know that, except for a couple of pithy cameos, he was absent from last season. As the beloved Jack O’Neill, Anderson was invaluable for his witty and deadpan ad-libs and as a foil for the increasingly smug presence of Michael Shanks.

Producers for the show explained that Anderson had steadily reduced his time commitments to the show over three years, in order to spend more time with his young daughter at home in California. He was asked to appear in the 200th episode and, during negotiations, Anderson offered to do a few more if the writers wanted to use his character to finish any unresolved storylines. In March, Anderson told his official Web site that he will appear in a total of five episodes for the franchise in the coming year. The show's former leading man will appear in additional episodes of SG-1's tenth year and will also guest star on the spinoff series, Stargate Atlantis, during its third season.

It is still unknown precisely how Anderson’s time will be divided between the two shows, but he makes his first appearance of the year in the SG-1’s 200th episode (appropriately titled “200"), which will air in August as the show’s sixth episode of the season. "200" will allow the cast and crew to work outside the traditional conventions of a Stargate episode while revisiting a comical storyline from the past—exactly 100 episodes ago. Thankfully, the show's producers report that Anderson's appearance in the episode will be more substantial than the brief appearances he made in season nine's "Avalon, Part 1" and "Origin."

Anderson’s co-star, Michael Shanks ("Daniel Jackson"), thrilled Stargate fans in January when he disclosed on his site that he will only appear in 16 of season ten's 20 episodes. Shanks will take off a couple of weeks in late March when his third child is born—a joyful occasion that will undoubtedly take his wife Lexa Doig ("Carolyn Lam") away from Stargate as well. Shanks also intends to take off a couple of weeks in the summer to spend time with his family. He speculated that with this schedule, he’ll probably miss the fourth and fifth episodes and two others in the season’s second half.

Darth Havisham?

2006-04-20T22:51:00.000-05:00

Although he has never publicly credited it as a source of inspiration, I suspect that George Lucas read Great Expectations as a child, and the subconscious reverberations of his encounter with the mad, vengeful Miss Havisham are directly responsible for certain traits of the Sith Lord, Darth Sidious / Palpatine, particularly his malevolence and poor hygiene.

The dowager Havisham was jilted on what was to have been her wedding day. Heartbroken, she cloistered herself in her dilapidated mansion, never removing her wedding dress (ew!) and only allowing a few people to see her. With manic, obsessive cruelty, she groomed her adopted child, Estella, to be a vicarious weapon with which to exact her revenge on men. Did I mention that she never took off her gown?

Similarly, Sidious lurked behind a curtain of secrecy and, occasionally, a coarse, oversized black robe, working with an ever-changing retinue of apprentices to engineer the tumultuous events that brought an end (temporarily) to the Jedi Order and the Republic.

It appears that personal hygiene was solely the province of Sidious’s alter ego, Palpatine. He was a sharp dresser and must have taken frequent breaks during his busy schedule for primping. Unfortunately, as the need for Palpatine’s presence diminished over the course of the series, Sidious became more prominent, and, by Episode VI, he had become a mere stinky shell of his formerly dapper self.

Both Sidious and Havisham are tragic victims of unchecked ambition and, more importantly, poor hygiene and bad fashion sense. In addition, I feel that Havisham missed her calling. Like her progeny, Havisham could appreciate the dark side of the force, with all its smelly, dirty trappings, and she would have made a great Sith Lord.

At Peace with the Lips

2006-04-19T21:02:00.000-05:00

While it has been said that At War with the Mystics is Wayne Coyne’s indictment of the Bush administration and the motivation behind the war in Iraq, the light touch of the album, particularly the vocalizations, shows that they can still be important without being self-important. In the album opener, "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song," while sounding vaguely reminiscent of Paul Simon, Coyne and company lend levity to the proceedings by including a vocal effect that sounds an awful lot like a talkbox, at times coming dangerously close to “Livin’ on a Prayer” territory. Since Richie Sambora’s resurrection of the talkbox in the summer of ’86, people around the world have been asking why Peter Frampton would encourage such abuse, and I was adamantly opposed to the effect ever being used again. But by conjuring memories of big hair, red spandex tights peeking through torn jeans, and the haughty rock-as-mythology theme of that album, Coyne successfully infuses humor and prevents the import of their message from seeming too forced or trite. Elsewhere, Wayne Coyne employs a quasi-falsetto to create the playful, ersatz Prince sound of "Free Radicals," and the album is replete with the sprawling, prog rock leanings of Pink Floyd.