Theme Week: Hello?

Saying hello is something every person has to do, eventually. It is an introduction to the person that follows. That's simple enough, but when you're a band who is putting out a new release, with what track do introduce the listener to your new material? How do you present your new artistic statement? Do you start a track that reassures fans that you haven't changed too much? Do you start with an example of your new sound? Do you start with the best song?

If you're Rise Against, and you're introducing Siren Song of the Counter Culture, you start with the absolutely ripping/nearly speed metal of State of the Union, which, by the way, will have you flailing your arms pretending there's a drum set in your immediate vicinity. This CD, of course, contained, their acoustic radio hit, "Swing Life Away", but as an introduction to the "new" Rise Against disc, it worked wonders. Put on the internet by the band a month in advance, the response was electric, and silenced the critics that said their new digs at Dreamworks softened them.

If you're dance-punk collective Head Automatica, and you're introducing Decadence, your best foot forward is the 2:14 ass-shaking "At the Speed of a Yellow Bullet", whose lyrical content is about an arms dealer. "I'm burning houses, baby!" Darryl exclaims and you're wondering just the guy is saying and why your hips are moving to it, but the beat just keeps going, and your body continues its motions.

If you’re math-metal wunderkinds Dillinger Escape Plan, and you’re introducing your new full length Miss Machine, you choose “Parasonic Youth” (currently downloadable on their MySpace page) as your opening track with your new singer screaming WE WROTE THESE PLANS, then you start with the inhumanly fast drumbeat with absurdly heavy guitars and you let that greet listeners who wonder if the 5 years between records and the new singer has had changed Dillinger dramatically.

Of course, if you're former-Misfits-fiends-turned-quazi-Brit-rockers AFI, and the disc you're introducing is the hotly anticipated Decemberunderground, you'll start with "Prelude 12/21" the same kind of gang vocal chanting that introduced your other major label release, Sing the Sorrow, with hints of the "cold-pop" flavor that is to come on Decemberunderground in the background.

If you're genre-defining act Minor Threat, you'll sequence your career discography such that possibly your most angry and to the point song "Filler", a 1:32 song about religion and violence, is the first song the listener hears. The aesthetic, short, fast, loud and nearly incomprehensible vocals would resonate through America.

And if you're me? You avoid the topic altogether, and weakly point back to your original post as evidence that you’ve followed through on the theme before it was announced If that doesn’t work, talk about some bands and releases you've come to cherish, and hope through speaking about the bands, the music, man, you've made a nice introduction to your character.

Oh well. Here’s how I introduce myself in public: nervously. Perhaps with a joke. A self-deprecating shot at least a minute into the conversation. Leave the vicinity as quickly as diplomatically possible, hoping I’ve come off passably.

If it’s an attractive member of the opposite sex, I just aim for not stammering and putting together a couple coherent sentences. Really, it’s all you can hope for in an introduction. Real conversations are for later.

P.S. Tom, as for who I’ve been mistaken for, the ones I remember are Daniel Radcliffe, a couple times every year, someone’s girlfriend (twice in the same week!) by the same guy, various 30 year old women and really, not much else.

It's always a tumor.

My sister, S, is obsessed with things easily. As I was growing up, she wanted to be a fashion designer, and live in Venice. Then she started thinking a lot about the end of the world, and how it wouldn't last twenty years. Fifteen years later, it was back to fashion a bit, before she started studying the art of non-verbal communication. Thanks to her "You're bored now, aren't you?" and "Stop looking away and pay attention" barrage, I now know what people are thinking when they talk to me - judging by their eye movements, they're often times thinking of something else. But more importantly, it brings to mind facial structure. My own is messed up; one side of my nasal ridge/cheek is drastically larger than the other. At least in my mind it is. People often tell me that they don't notice until I mention it. People lie. I can feel their eyes, like jackals, prying apart my very flesh! My only real comfort is in finding people who have more pronounced facial deformities, and seeing how well they fare. Ha ha, uggos.

Well, I succeeded in my task. I can imagine what this guy must've gone through as his facial too-mah developed - probably neck pain. Beyond that, though, the well of my ideas runs dry. Also, what people thought of when they talked to him. Like, all the normal visual cues are gone, replaced with tumor. I wonder how many people were inadvertantly offended by him not responding in the proper way. Or even if we knew that he was a he! God only knows how the ladies gussy themselves up these days.

This guy already work on the subject, and probably a lot better than I ever could. Lord knows I've had some people mistake me for a lady* in the past, and I can only imagine what Zach and James must face, since they shave and grow their hair out long because they're hippies or unicorns trapped in human form (respectively).

*Albeit an ugly one.

I don't want to make this some kind of feminist rant, because bleargh. But like I mentioned before, saying hello is a risk, and oftentimes, putting your worst foot forward is unavoidable. Especially if your face is eight-hundred percent tumor. I remember talking to my grandmother in a nursing home when I was very young, how I thought she just looked scared all the time - ever since then, I've been unable to really "get into" the nursing home scene. I wasn't really interested in talking to her, I was primarily interested in getting the h-e-double-hockeysticks out of there. It's no wonder that certain cultures attribute powers to the deformed, to the hard-to-figure-out, why they used inbreds and freaks as models to sculpt a thousand unique gargoyles onto Notre Dame, but used the same ho-hum looks for every angel and saint. Faces are terrifying when we can't figure them out.

So, like, internets, right? No faces, no inscrutability, because we imagine what we want from other people.

Which I guess is why we need photos on this thing.

In Which the First Theme Week is Introduced

Hello!

Welcome to the blog. I'm Thomas. Hi, how are you doing? I love what you've done with your hair. No, no, not ironically - I really mean it. I accents your face. Before we get going in earnest, I think it's important to mention that Zach has made his way into the eye of the internet itself.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=4543

So, how's that for legitimacy?

As mentioned earlier, we're just saying hello. It's something I don't do every day, because I'm basically a recluse. The people that I say hello to are captives, people working in the service industry who I buy my food from. I don't mean to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat, but I do enjoy trying to lighten the day of the working class. Actually, I totally meant to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat. Someone needs to fetch me wine, and to tell that one slave to dance - his antics amuse me.

Personal predilections aside, saying hello is an interesting sensation. We are presenting ourselves with our worst foot forward; we are not who we introduce ourselves as. Our real friends know what lazy, indulgent, inept, and deliriously self-important sophists we are. Meeting someone new, we have, what, thirty seconds to convince the new person that we are witty, charming, urbane, athletic, and good looking.

Further, people carry filthy diseases that they then transmit onto you.

Meeting new people brings with it untold existential stress. Since we often seek to define ourselves through how others see us, to hold very complimentary mirrors up to reality, then, what we say and do literally becomes who we are. How many people out there have met a really cute guy/girl/other at a bar, stumbled out an awkward introduction, and then felt like leaping off a cliff, because the sad charade of their existence isn't worth the resources they're consuming? Similarly, how often do you meet some drunken, unshaved lout, and then the two of you continue to talk the rest of the night, discussing the threat of Uggo Vampires?* Meeting new people, then, becomes an inadvertant form of narcisissm. We value strangers for their appearances, because they present themselves in the ways that we wish we were. Their rejection is a confirmation of our own faults. Likewise, talking to crazy people about made-up undead menaces serves only to compliment our own social grace and tact, that we can so impolitely convince someone less than ourselves of the rightness of our ideas.

*I mention this only to let the rest of the world know - in our struggle against these unnattractive princes of the night, you are not alone.

The internet is the worst thing ever, if only because audiences are then held captive. The written word is historically unable to convey proper conversational dynamism that's needed to create proper communicatin'. Which is why, perhaps, that the upsurge in blogs (like this one!) is a good thing for society and for language. More options mean more divergence from tradition. While small-minded hill-people may smear Youtube with their hateful screed, overexposure to this lowest-common-denominator numbs our senses. All that is foul about spelling and grammar set into the ignorable norms, while people who are inventive with language fall to the much-noticed margins of popular viewing.

I can only hope that Eleven Names is able to follow through on it's original mission statement* and provide some kind of entertainment or whatever to you, the viewer. Incidentally, I did just re-read the above, and after reading "inventive with language", I kind of want to jump off a bridge. SEE? SEE?

*Zach: The internet can pay for our beer, Thomas!
Thomas: Where do I sign up?

Interstitial

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to what is, with any luck, not at all a terrible idea. My name is Zach, and I hope to be one of your hosts for the foreseeable future. There are many things to be done and said, but I vanish off the face of the internet for the weekend in a few scant hours, so let me be brief, now, so that I can be longwinded later.

There are three of us here.

We are here to write, and support each other in our writing efforts.

We are here to write with as much talent and skill as we can muster.

We will write about whatever strikes our fancy, and we will do so in whatever fashion we wish. There may, and probably will, be theme weeks.

Right now, the theme is saying hello.

Hello.

And now, so that you don't feel like this was a complete and total waste of your time, let me talk to you a bit about William Gibson's Virtual Light, which I finished today as part of my ongoing effort to read his books in the least chronological order possible, providing you started with Neuromancer. (And didn't we all?)

As briefly as I can, because I can certainly use whatever sleep I can get:

The central image of Gibson's Virtual Light is not the augmented-reality eyewear that the title references--sunglasses which manipulate your optic nerves electromagnetically, allowing you to see things that aren't there at the native resolution of your brain, without any light striking your eyeballs: literal virtual light--but the abandoned and then repurposed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which gives its name not to the book, but to the entire trilogy.

A trilogy I read in reverse order, and with other books of Gibson's mixed in between.

This is an approach that worked surprisingly well.

All Tomorrow's Parties hooked me with the richness and the weirdness of its language, the strange structure of its narrative, the way it seemed to twist and turn and cavort, and how little of the character's pasts were explained, and how little that mattered. I always knew enough to keep reading, feeling like I was assembling a puzzle.

When I got to the end, I found myself wondering about the beginning.

Idoru was next, and in it I found characters I thought I knew and characters I thought I didn't, and another winding tale where the protagonists came at a situation from all sides, met once, and spun off again in different directions, sometimes together, sometimes not. And the details of the vision and the immense skill of the writing drew me in deeper, but I was never sure which books belonged together.

So I read more Gibson, over the course of most of a year, picking up books and devouring them as I found them. But it wasn't until today that I finished Virtual Light, and traced the threads back as far as the author intended them to go, and caught a glimpse of the shape of the whole.

The bridge at the heart of the books is not so much an edifice as a space, a gap, an opportunity.
An interstice, to borrow the man's own terms. The world of the bridge is an interstitial community, as the book is a story that exists in the spaces between worldshattering events, and the characters are people between, always coming or going but never seeming to arrive.

A space outside of normal society, where a new society has been created. Characters that have been displaced from the normal context of their lives, moving in the spaces between other people's worlds, and changing.

In the spaces between monoliths, life flourishes.

Welcome aboard.

I'm out here standing on a rooftop screaming "Hey world are you listening to me?"

Hello.

Much like most other blogs out there, our inception consists of a lot of enthusiasm, but few concrete details. (I said yes before the question was finished, by the way) To put our mission as precisely as I’m aware of it, we’re three nerds, unrepentant and full of opinions. It would not surprise me if from time to time we post opinions on politics. By and large, they’ll be pretty liberal. More than likely, there will be a lot of discussion of comic books, video games and various role-playing systems (D&D, GURPS, etc) because that seems to be the overlap in our copious free time.

For an introduction: Hi, I’m James. I’m the youngest around these parts. I listen to an obscene amount of punk rock music. In fact, I write for pastepunk.com in a news and interview capacity. I also keep up ipso.vox.com, which is based towards more video games and music politics. I have a feeling that ipso will be merged with this blog, but that’s neither here nor there. Or perhaps it won’t. I get the feeling this is pushed towards more of a length format, whereas ipso.vox.com is just getting ideas and thoughts off my chest at the time they come to me. Here, I’ll be thinking about things for a while, and then writing about them, not the other way around. Quite often, in fact.

Let’s get started, then. BioWare (you might know their games: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire and other PC RPG staples…) announced they’re working on an RPG for the Nintendo DS. Righto. Could be awesome. The IP? Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yes, I’m serious, a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG, made for the Nintendo DS by BioWare.

Putting aside the feeling of being absolutely perplexed, there’s reason to be hopeful. BioWare has a pretty excellent track record with their craft, so at least in theory, the game shouldn’t have a tremendous amount of technical problems. The Nintendo DS and it’s retired counterpart, the GBA SP, seem to be smaller Super Nintendos, so at the very least, there will probably be an “old school” feeling to the just announced game. This is a nice aesthetic choice, since recently, as you may have heard, Sonic hasn’t really starred in games, so much as been whored out for snuff films, so putting an icon in the hands of a developer who appear to know what they’re doing is good news, no matter which way you look at it.

Also, as Nintendo and Square showed, you can have a genre-defining icon star in a game type that is completely anti-thetical to the original, and it can work wonders. In another form of art completely, Slayer took that kind of a leap with South of Heaven, and guess what, it’s a grower, and now full live performance of the CD is included on the reissue to their 2006 CD Christ Illusion.

It’s also an interesting bit of convergence. 10 years ago, I doubt you’d see anything like this, since Sega and Nintendo were bitter rivals. True, there have been Sonic handheld games on the Nintendo DS, but a full blown RPG made by a third party with no relation to either developer is especially interesting. I’m not excited, but at least interested and perhaps, perhaps hopeful.

Just saying that makes me happy. Hopeful for a new Sonic game.

To that end, I don’t think there’s a better way to inaugurate a new blog then with hope. To greater and greater things.

MIKE CHECK ONE TWO ONE TWO

Jigga what?

And once more

For posterity.

There now.

Blue again.

And now blue.

Don't worry, I'll clean these all up later.

Check. Check.

Are we rolling? I hope so.

Fire Three

This is still a test.

Test 2

Fire two, Mister Gibbs.

Test.

Test, 1, 2. Test.

Hah hah, take that, intarwub.