Songs I Like, And I Think You Will Like Too

It's a recurring feature!

Admittedly, this is more songs I like and less songs I think you'll like too. But Mastodon is just too awesome to pass up. It's intense and loud and all things METAL, but the band also has a flair for complexity that really helps keeps things in balance. Their songs are incredibly well constructed (displaying much of the same craftsmanship shown in the also-awesome video), and surprisingly delicate; if one melody, one riff was just ever so slightly out of place, the whole thing would descend into shitty scream-rock. But it walks that tightrope, and it does it damn well.

Also, the Apocalypse-Beast-Head might be the coolest thing I've seen all week. I want one of those. No idea what I'd do with it, but I want one.

Game of Thrones Whining

I caught the Game of Thrones bug. Loved the TV show, and immediately went out and bought the first book after it all wrapped up. I'd had it recommended to me a few times before (the book, that is), and I even have a collection of George R.R. Martin's short stories sitting on my bookshelf collecting dust. Good stuff, no doubt, but it didn't drive me to obsession with the man. A Game of Thrones, on the other hand...wow. The man knows how to do an epic narrative. The plots are complex, the characters interesting, and despite the fact that it is VERY MUCH a fantasy novel (Christ, it starts with Ice Zombies), the entire thing, as many reviews have mentioned, feels more like a political drama than your typical swords-and-sorcery epic.

But that's not to say the book doesn't have its problems. While I was reading, I hit a wall about 4/5s of the way through, literally a hundred pages from the end. One chapter did me in. A Catelyn chapter. I just can't get behind her, as a character, which REALLY bugs me, considering on paper I think she actually seems fairly interesting. Here's a woman, a wife and mother, who sees nearly EVERYONE she loves taken away from her. It's a tragic arc, and it should be great. But it's not, and her chapters are just a slog to get through.

Part of the problem, I think, and part of the reason why I have such a hard time getting behind her character, is that there is frankly not much conflict inherent in her premise, or at least not much active, physical conflict that she herself is driving. Tyrion, Ned, and Jon are all wrapped up in very real struggles for power and fame and honor and their respective lives. Arya is trying to carve out her own place in a world that will not way accept her (not to mention surviving on the streets of King's Landing), Daenerys is rebuilding a home she never had, and Bran must come to terms with his new limitations. Even Sansa, who could very easily have suffered from the same problems as her mother, has a turbulent and active character arc. In fact, Sansa might be one of my favorite characters in the first book. She's an idealist, and the fact is Westeros, King's Landing, and the court of Prince Joffrey ARE going to break her. It's not if her romantic notions of her Prince Charming will fall apart, but rather when. It's a tragic arc in a way, the inevitable collision that you just can't help but watch.

Cat has none of this. Cat's arc is clearly grounded in family, and how she relates to her relatives and loved ones. They seem to drop like flies around her, and every time she must survive to pick up the pieces. But the problem is she doesn't DO anything. She spends the first third of the book literally sitting in a room watching a someone sleep, and the last third watching her son go to war. It's a lot of watching and frankly, for all that these events are critical to the plot, Catelyn's character feels entirely secondary to them. In fact, it often feels like she's simply an extra pair of eyes, watching important plot developments for us. She feels like a device and not a fully formed person, in a book that is practically bursting with real, human characters.

As a somewhat interesting aside, I found Cat to be a great character in the TV series. Sure, she was still passive, but we weren't forced to endure her narration whenever we went back to her storylines, something that I think made her a lot more tolerable. Michelle Fairley also deserves some credit here, as she's able to take a lot of the angst inherent in Cat's character and distill it to little, visual moments rather than multi-page blocks of text.

Admittedly, I'm only one book into a massive series, and a first book at that. Maybe Martin figured this all out in Clash of Kings. He is, after all, a fairly talented writer, as we have seen. But as it stands, every time I finish a chapter I turn the page dreading I'll find Catelyn's name on the next page.

Songs I Like, And I Think You Will Like Too

K. Flay. Chicago native, Stanford grad, and generally awesome person and musician. I dream of a Childish Gambino/K. Flay double team. One day...

And no, I have no idea what's up with that image. I like that too, though.

To Boldly Go...

So today we saw what may very well be the last space shuttle launch ever. At the very least, it's the last one for a very long time.

There are a hundred reasons to shut down NASA. It's highly impractical, a massive money sink, and with a failing economy and environmental disasters left and right, it doesn't make any sense to keep the program running. But I can't help but be sad.

Some day, a great civilization will sail across the stars. They will travel from planet to planet, and see wonders beyond their wildest imaginations. And they will find ruins everywhere they go, the last remnants of countless civilizations who discovered the secrets of space travel, but gave up on it because it was too impractical. To condem ourselves to just one world is just that; condemnation. A death sentence. The beginning of the end.

Is this alarmist? Perhaps. The future is a big place, and anything can happen. But our planet has an inarguably limited lifespan, and unless we find a way off it we have a limited lifespan too. But it's more than just Malthus-driven pessimism. I'm an optimist at heart. And nothing lifts an optimist's heart more than looking up at the stars, and seeing a galaxy brimming with potential, with literally millions of worlds waiting to be explored. But what now? What will we tell our children when they look up to the stars? "We've been there, there's nothing to see". We need explorers, people willing to boldly go where no man has gone before. And instead we get penny pinchers and people telling us it's impractical.

Screw impractical. Let's go on an adventure.

Giant's Teeth

There is a city in California where the dead outnumber the living one thousand to one. It's nestled in the hills outside San Francisco, very easy to miss. White gravestones line the hills as far as the eye can see, like the teeth of countless prehistoric giants, dead and long forgotten. The residents live in the midst of all this, huddled together in the center of town. From every window in every house you can see a dozens graves. They built it that way.

There is a city in California where the dead outnumber the living one thousand to one. It's a quiet town, and you probably won't meet your neighbors. People move in all the time, but they never seem to say for very long. And whenever people move away, they always feel like they have to justify their actions. Too hard a commute. Poor schools. Transferring to a new job. Though eventually they do all come back.

There is a city in California where the dead outnumber the living one thousand to one. It's a painfully dull place, not much to do on the weekends. But you can go for walks between the marble headstones, walks that seem to go on forever. The monuments slip by, one after the other, faster and faster, until they all begin to run together into a blur, and you realize you've seen this one before. You've walked by it a dozen times, but never really stopped to look. And you won't stop to look now either. You won't even slow down.

There is a city in California where the dead outnumber the living one thousand to one. Some people say it's haunted. Few things would be more comforting. Because when you look out your window, you don't see ghosts, or spirits, or shades in the night. You see a cold white stone, a small patch of grass, and if you're lucky a dried out bouquet, crumbling in the wind. You see a fading name on an old rock. And after a while, you don't see anything at all.

Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.

There's something surprisingly animalistic about cooking, and specifically about butchery. It's also one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen. To stand above a cutting board with the solid heft of a knife weighing down your hand is a great feeling, and the sheer sense of control you get, when you've practiced enough and you know your blade and you're finally getting comfortable, is one of the purest forms of physical poetry I can think of. It also appeals to the engineer in me, seeing the clockwork aspect of the meat before me and knowing how to pick it apart, piece by piece. It's a power rush, no doubt, but it feels solid, right, and good.

Nor do I think I'm alone in this feeling. To watch any decent chef go to work with a knife is a thing to behold. The strokes are quick, careful, but confident and absolutely final. The rush of butchery also happens to be why I find professionals chefs to be so damn intimidating. Obviously someone yelling at you with a massive meat cleaver in one hand is a scary sight, but the simple knowledge that this person is so inhumanly skilled with what is frankly a weapon is downright terrifying, especially with some of the more unhinged personalities I've seen in the kitchen. Chefs are scary, simple as that.

Butchery, however, is also one of those skills that is very quickly being thrown to the dogs (Much like the gristle being cut! Bad jokes, away!), especially in home kitchens. So much of our butchery is done at the local Megamart these days that most people couldn't point out the breast on a chicken, let alone where their steaks are coming from. And that's fine, I suppose. This is the march of progress, the cost of specialization. But it's also a bit sad. We're losing basic knowledge about what's on our plate and how it got there. And in a food culture that's growing more aware of what it consumes, more conscious of its diet, I can only hope that we turn that same concern to our meat as well.

But what concerns me is that all of this could very easily be lost in the growing vegan, vegetarian, and raw movement that is sweeping kitchens around the world. And, points where points are due, there is something inherently savage about butchery, and something somewhat off about finding it so appealing. But to accuse any chef, or anyone that enjoys working with a knife in the kitchen, of being bloodthirsty is an absurd and childish argument. It would be like accusing a watchmaker of being destructive because he likes to take fine work apart. The passion is motivated by curiosity more than anything else, by the desire to see everything open and laid out. And fine knife work is in and of itself an art, something that takes years of practice and dedication to develop.

So keep at it, and if you've never really worked in the kitchen, give it a shot some time. Go in, get your hands dirty, and try taking something to pieces. If nothing else, you'll probably get a good meal out of it.