WWdN: In Exile

alive in the weeds

Nolan just called me from school to tell me that he got an 88 on a history test that he was really nervous about even passing.

He was walking down the hallway from one class to the next, and I could hear the sound of his peers swarming around him, in that dull almost-roar that fills high schools between classes before the campus drops back into near silence for 48 minutes.

I told him how proud of him I was, and how happy I was that he took the time to call me and tell me about it.

"I called mom, too," he said, "but now I have to go into class so I gotta go."

"Okay," I said. "I'm really proud of you, Nolan. Have a great weekend at your dad's. I love you."

"I love you too, Wil." He said. "Bye."

I love it that my 14 year-old told cared enough to call me and share good news about his grades, and told me that he loves me, even though he was surrounded by his peers.

i'm about to collapse into a singularity of geek

And now, a chance to use "blog this page" in performancing:

It's a little weird for me to make the news that I'm editing, but
when you're as up to your +3 Helmet of Monty Python Quoting in geek as
I am, sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Thank you for your
indulgence. Your case of Bawls is in the mail.

SuicideGirls  News  Geek  Your Humble Geek Editor Talks to the Global Gaming League

Technorati Tags: geek, gamer

i find it hard to tell you, because i find it hard to take

Last night I watched an amazing episode of TNG called Family.

It is a truly wonderful episode that focuses on the human element of Star Trek. It is very dark and very heavy. It deals with the consequences of some very serious events from earlier in the series: Picard's assimilation by the Borg and subsequent stint as Locutus, Worf facing his parents for the first time since his discommendation in Sins of the Father, and Wesley's first face-to-face meeting with his father, Jack Crusher, via a holographic message which Jack made for him when Wesley was born.

It is a fantastic opportunity for the Patrick, Michael and me to take a brilliant script, filled with wonderful dialogue and complex relationships, and show the world what we can do as actors.

Partick and Michael are brilliant. They make the very most of every single scene, especially when Michael deals with the conflict between Worf's need to suffer for his discommendation with his obvious love for his parents, and when Patrick finally lets Picard's fall completely apart as he acknowledges how helpless he felt at Wolf-359 and deals with its aftermath. It is a Ron Moore script that previews the depth and pathos that I have come to love on Battlestar Galactica, and they are absolutely outstanding in it.

And me? Ron gave me a chance to really shine, to explore some complex emotion and take Wesley beyond the two-dimensional caricature I often complained he'd become. I finally had a chance to explore and perform a human side of Wesley as he sees the face of his father and hears his voice for the first time in his life. I finally had a chance to really do something after years of saying "Aye, sir, warp six, sir" . . . and I fucking phoned it in. I sat there and I made all my stupid little faces and acted like I cared, but It's painfully clear that I was halfway out the door. I totally and completely blew it. I was ashamed as I watched my eighteen year-old self last night, and rather disgusted by the time my scenes were over.

I looked extremely tanned, so the episode was probably shot in summer, and I'm sure I would have rather been at the beach with my friends instead of wearing a spacesuit on stage nine, but it's no excuse. I was expected to be professional and do my job, and instead I was a bullshit hack who didn't show up for work. I suppose the director could have knocked me into shape, but who knows what was going on at the time for him? And who knows if I would have even listened to him? After all, I was eighteen and I knew everything. I had the whole world figured out.

There were so many opportunities in that scene: opportunities to look at him and try to see myself in his eyes or hear myself in his voice; opportunities to make a rare emotional connection with a scene that didn't involve a lot of techno babble and opportunities to just be simple and honest and truthful. As an actor, I should have thought about all the things we never got to do together, I should have done everything I could to stretch the moment out as long as possible, so the audience is left thinking that Wesley is going to sit in that holodeck and sob and miss his dad and watch that thing over and over for the next several hours. At the very least, I certainly should have allowed myself to feel the resulting sense of loss, but as a fucking douchebag teenager I didn't feel anything. I'm pretty sure I walked into stage nine completely full of myself, and didn't stop checking my watch until I was done with the scene.

Jesus, what a pathetic waste. What a complete and total fucking waste. On that day, I didn't deserve to wear that uniform, and I certainly didn't earn the right to call myself an actor.

It is such a great episode, and I'm so ashamed and disappointed that I didn't realize it at the time. 

Ron, if you happen to read this: I am so sorry. When I saw you at Grand Slam, I thanked you for all the gifts you gave me over the years; I'd forgotten about this one (probably because I didn't appreciate it at the time, in all my teenage arrogance and I am so sorry that I disrespected your work and didn't honor the gift you gave me. Your work deserved better, and I was too much of an idiot to live up to the material. I can't imagine what it must have been like to create something so wonderful, only to watch it destroyed by an arrogant and entitled teenager. I am so, so sorry.

I have learned much since I was eighteen. In fact, I became aware of what a douche I was about a year after I filmed this episode, and realized that I need to get the hell out of Hollywood and find out who I really was and who I wanted to be. I spent the next three years working all that shit out, looking at myself in the mirror every day until I could truly say that I liked the person I saw reflected back.

These days, I don't take anything for granted, and I always do my very best to rise to the challenge of the material I'm lucky enough to be given. I wouldn't change anything about my life, because the person I am today grew out of the person I once was . . . but I'd sure like a chance to take that wonderful material and do it justice.

Hopefully, I'll get to watch an episode tonight that I can feel proud of.

(image from Memory Apha)

Afterthought - I put a version of this in comments, but here it is for the rest of all y'all (or is it all y'alls? all of y'alls?): It is important to me to examine and reflect on my life, whether it's something I'm fiercely proud of, like my performance in Best of Both Worlds I & II, or something I'm not proud of, like the things I've written about here.

When Family was over last night, I had a visceral feeling of shame and regret as strong as the feeling of terror I had writing about my first day of high school yesterday. It's lived in me all day, so I finally decided to write about it tonight.

I don't intend for this to become some sort of big pity party for me or anything, and by writing this, I don't feel that I'm sitting in a funk, dwelling on the past, wasting he present (I've done lots of that in the last few years, and I think I've hung on that cross enough, thank you.)

I absolutely love who I am today, both as a creative writer/actor and as a person. When everything is stripped away and I am left with nothing but my naked soul, I am very comfortable with what I have. I wouldn't have that if I didn't reflect on all the peaks and valleys of my life, including moments like these.

Now that I think of it, if I didn't have such respect for Ron Moore, and if I hadn't just seen him two weeks ago, I may not have had such a profoundly powerful reaction to my performance (or lack thereof) in his episode.

Anyway, if I didn't tear down the wall from time to time, I'd just sit here and wait for the worms to come, and nobody wants that. Trust me.

my mind is filled with silvery star

This is the second time in about forty minutes that I've wanted to change the title of an entry. First: "when i'm boss of the universe . . ." should be called "new slang", or "gold teeth and a curse" if I wanted to be slightly more obscure and rewarding to anyone who figured it out.

"i call the big one bitey" is a nice homage to a long ago time when The Simpsons was still consistently funny, but "antmusic" would be cooler. "dirk wears white socks"  would be even better, but "kings of the final frontier" would probably be the most obscure and rewarding (the ant habitat was originally designed by NASA, and I'll let you figure the rest out on your own.)

Now this is a little weird: iTunes must know that I'm writing about music, because for the last seven songs, it has taken me on a little time warp to my teens. These songs are listed in the exact order that they came up. It was set to shuffle through my entire library (currently organized by album title), which is pretty eclectic, so the choice of tunes is particularly eerie.

Songs with their associated memories:

Cinderella Undercover - I am driving my brand new 1989 Honda Prelude Si 4WS to work on Star Trek. I don't know why, but in all of my memories, it's early morning, it's cold, and it's a little foggy. I loved that car, and it's the same one that was just slightly better than Patrick Stewart's, if you've heard that story.

Don't Be Square, Be There - My friend Guy (who was also my stand-in on TNG) introduced me to Adam and the Ants via the Kings of the Wild Frontier album. I can still see the tape, an old TDK number with "Adam and the Ants" on one side and "Kings of the Wild Frontier" on the other, written in Guy's realy cool architect writing, in a smoky grey case with no paper insert. Guy lived in Costa Mesa, and after I got my Mac II -- in color, with four fraking megabyes of RAM, man! -- I'd put it in my car and drive down to Guy's on the weekend so we could appletalk our machines together and play NetTrek and Spaceward Ho! People often asked me in interviews how I avoided the drugs and partying scene that claimed the lives and futures of so many of my peers; I've just realized that this is a major reason why: when they were getting high and courting the paparazzi in night clubs they were too young to be in, I was sitting in Guy's house playing really geeky games.

Still Ill - When I was in my very early teens, I had one of those massive teenage crushes that consumes your every waking moment and requires you to listen to endless hours of The Smiths in your bedroom wondering why she doesn't like you "in that way." This particular crush was on Kyra, who was so beautiful, and so smart, and so cool, and so a senior when I was a freshman it was never going to happen. Kyra introduced me to The Smiths (on Vinyl, no less), the Violent Femmes (in her BMW 2002 while we were driving to see Harvey at a local college) and was goth before goth was goth. Though I had such a massive crush on her, we were great friends, and she never broke my heart.

Pale Shelter - I heard this on the radio in my mom's car on my way to my first day of public high school at Crescenta Valley High School, and it will always remind me of that day. I was terrified. I remember sitting into first period history class, and not even knowing that I was supposed to write "per. 1" on my papers. I remember that it was nothing like I'd seen in movies and on TV, and how the kids in all my classes were so cruel to me. I was shy, I was scared to death, and I was so withdrawn as a result, they all decided that I was aloof and arrogant and I never got a chance to correct that first impression. Wow - as I write this, I can feel that terror all over again. I feel it in my muscle memory and in my soul. Gods, I felt so tiny as I walked across the quad on that first day, like a little kid who lost his mom in the department store. The time I spent at CV was the absolute worst in my life.

How Beautiful You Are - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me was the first compact disc I had, and it's a good thing, too. I love this record so much, I would have worn it out in any other medium. This was also during the "W + K 4EVR" phase, and, nerdly little artist that I was, whenever I heard this song I longed to go with her to Paris and dance in the rain together. You know what I just realized? I don't think I ever told her that I was so fiercely head over heels for her, and she either knew and didn't call me out, or I had the perfect combination of infatuation and insecurity to keep it to myself. I wonder where she is today, and how she's doing? Hrm.

Charge of the Batmobile - My best friend, Darin, lived just over one mile from my house, across windy streets up in the hills above La Crescenta. We were such Batman geeks and we were such stupid teens, we frequently put this song on my tape deck and drove way too fast across those windy streets late at night between our two houses. It's a miracle we never crashed or hurt anyone or anything.

Phonetic Alphabet - NATO - This is from disc 2 of The Conet Project. I never heard a numbers station in my teens, but I spent a lot of time listening to my shortwave radio and my police scanner (I told you I was a geek) so it reminds me of sitting in the dark (because shortwave listening is so much better when you're in the dark, for some reason) late at night when propagation was better, spinning the dial and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world to hear transmissions from the other side of the planet. I'm glad the Cold War is over, but boy do I miss the SW propaganda broadcasts.

And the Conet Project is the perfect coda to this trip in the wayback machine. That invisible woman's voice, sending a message to some unknown person in an unknown land, shot into the ionosphere and back, captured by someone else in another time is almost too perfect. If I saw it in a movie, I'd never believe it. Good thing this isn't a movie.

"romeo, romeo, lima, yankee, november, oscar, oscar, zulu . . . end of message end of t--"

i call the big one bitey

Months ago, I bought the supercool Antworks ant farm from Think Geek.

Six to eight weeks ago, I ordered the little critters who would amuse me endlessly with their incessant tunneling, and waited for them to arrive. Yesterday, the wait ended.

Around ten in the morning, I put the ants into their new gel-filled home, and by three or so in the afternoon, they'd begun to tunnel down the side. Before bed last night, around twelve hours after they'd moved in, they reached the bottom of the habitat, and started to work their way over to the side.

Holy crap, man. I sat there and watched them dig their way across the bottom for close to thirty minutes. Because of the gel, I could see their mandibles pulling chunks out of the growing tunnel, and it looked like it was sort of blooming open.

When I got up this morning, I ran straight to the ants, and the picture here is what I found: they worked all night long, and have two growing tunnels across the whole thing. In fact, as I've been writing this, they've just broken through on the left side of the picture.

There are things here that still images can't capture: it's surprisingly satisfying to watch one ant start at the top of the habitat and work its way down into the tunnels. They all interact with each other in fantastically interesting ways, probing with their mandibles and antennae, and as far as I can tell, they never complain about the work. When they pass over the LEDs at the bottom of the thing, they cast this eerie shadow up into the gel that looks lie what you'd expect to see if The Abyss and Them! had a love child.

There are a couple more pictures of the habitat in my flickr stream.

when i'm boss of the universe . . .

Two words I'd like to remove from the Universe:

deets - The word is "Details," not "deets." "deet" is an important ingredient in insect repellent.

peeped - Did you look at it? Then you saw it. You did not "peep" it. And your friends? They are your friends. They are not your "peeps." Your "peeps" are tasty little marshmallow chunks, shaped like birds and covered with enough sugar to give you type 2 diabetes after one box. They are especially tasty if you let them reach the perfect point of almost-too-stale before eating them.

Thank you.

Online Neighborhood Watch Nails Phishers

This could be a really cool thing, if it's done correctly:

A volunteer group, dubbed the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination squad (PIRT), will take in reports from consumers of suspected phishing Web sites and work to take the sites offline.

On Friday, before its official launch, the group received 100 phishing reports, and 30 of those were shut down in a few hours.

read more | digg story

Most of us can quickly and easily spot a phishing scandal (if it even gets past our filters) but it's people like our parents who need to be protected. If we can work together to nail these phishing fuckers at the server level, it's time well spent.

 

Geek Editor (with two exciting updates)

For the last several months, I've been editing the technology newswire at Suicide Girls. It's been a lot of fun to interact with the community over there, and I've had a really good time digging up hawesome, amusing, and informative tech stories for them.

In the last month or so, the overlords are making some changes to the site, including the newswire, to make more than just a pin-up site. To that end, they've recently added a ton of new writers and editors, and changed our sections around quie a bit.

Last night, my section was changed from technology to geek, and I went from being the technology editor to being the geek editor, complete with shiny new title. I just about shot a d10 out my nose when I saw the change! Bow before me, for I am geek! Snort. Snort. 3d8 + 4

According to the announcement, "Geek is about video games, comics, role playing games, computer hacking, Linux, OS X, mocking Windows Vista, etc," so I'm pretty psyched to add comics and games to the list of news I can write and edit, now. I'm especially happy that any ambiguity about the deductibility of certain research materials has been effectively removed, as well.

I think it's time for a trip to the Last Grenadier, then to the comic shop. For, uh, research. Yeah.

Snort. Snort.

42.

Update: In comments, Elayne says, "I don't get it. Why are you writing for a pinup site in the first place? I think it's pretty unwelcoming for female readers to begin with."

It's a valid question, and one which I imagine crossed more than a few minds. I know lots of you (about 16000 at last count) read this via RSS and may miss comments, so here's my response:

I don't have any problems with writing for SG, because I don't find their content offensive in any way. I really like the people I work with, I like drawing a small paycheck to write and edit, and the little chunk of community I've interacted with there (mostly geeks like me) have made me feel very welcome.

I completely respect that not everyone thinks SG is okay, though, and if you're personally offended that I write for or am associated with the site, I completely understand and support your decision to not read my stories there, or even stop reading my blog entirely, if you feel that strongly about it.

Personally, I feel like it's a Venn diagram of Playboy, Vanity Fair, Cosmo, and a flurry of tattoo and goth culture magazines, and I don't find the content exploitive or pornographic in any way. But your milage may vary, and whatever that milage may be, I respect it.

Oh, and at my suggestion, the newswire has been made entirely safe for work, so you can read the news (like my story today about Facebook turning down 750 million while reportedly holding out for two BILLION dollars, which features a bonus Back to the Future reference, and some musings on how stupid online advertisers are) and interviews without encountering teh boobies. You're welcome (I think.)

 

One more, after a few more comments:

There is an entire page at Suicide Girls dedicated to addressing all the various rumors and allegations: http://suicidegirls.com/trash/

There are also numerous testimonials from several of the models, who all seem pretty happy with the site: http://suicidegirls.com/trash/testimonials/

I've noticed that most people tend to project their personal biases and and preconceptions into the site: if a person is opposed to nude modeling (for whatever reason) they tend to think the site is exploiting women, and are prone to uncritically believing the various charges made against the site and its owners. If people are cool with the nude modeling (male or female), they tend to discard the rumors, and if they have an opinion at all on the "exploitation" issue, tend to conclude that it's more empowering than, say, modeling for Suze Randall.

As I said before, since I am an editor on the newswire, those issues don't affect or concern me. The models I know all seem very happy with their work and enjoy being part of the site; the people I have worked with on staff have been fantastic, honorable, and respectable people (unlike the people I worked for at G4, for example.)

And I made with a whole bunch of the funny (to me at least) in this story about finding out where your Xbox was born.

No thank you, I! Thank! You!

Comments from the Wife: In Exile

On June 4th, Wil and I and our friends Shawn and Michelle will be running in the Rock-n-Roll Marathon in San Diego as a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation. This will be the second time we have participated in this marathon. The first time we did it was in 2004, because our friend Kris was diagnosed with leukemia and we wanted to do something to help funding for finding a cure. If you didn't read about this when we did it the first time, here's a brief summary of what happened.  

In August of 2003, our friend Kris was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. A month later she started chemotherapy at her local hospital. Treatment was unsuccessful, so she was admitted to City Of Hope Hospital in Duarte, California to begin an aggressive treatment of radiation and chemotherapy. The cancer was taking over quickly so her only hope was to harvest her own stem cells and transplant them back to her after treatment. This was a very grueling time for Kris as well as her family and friends as we all felt so helpless to do anything. I wasn't Kris' blood type so I couldn't donate to her. I tried donating platelets three times, but my body decided it didn't want to let me. Then I heard about the Rock-n-Roll marathon in San Diego for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and knew that was the way to help. A nurse at the hospital told me it costs $25,000 a day for cancer research so I decided that would be our fund-raising goal. I wrote about Kris' progress on Wil's site and our own training progress for the marathon. So many people wrote such wonderful words of support and had stories of their own with loved ones battling cancer and making it through, I printed out all these comments and brought them to Kris in the hospital to read. It was very inspirational for her and a great distraction while she spent all those weeks in bed. Kris said her treatment was the hardest thing she had ever done and would never do it again. When it came time to do the marathon, we were so excited because not only did WWdN readers raise $28,420, but Kris was waiting for us at the finish line.

Over the past two years, Wil has mentioned to me on several occasions that people wanted to know how Kris was doing, and if I'd make a post for his blog about her. Today, I can finally tell you. The first year was great. Kris' bone marrow biopsy came back clean and her health continued to improve. She got her hair back and was able to go on vacation.

In October of last year, Kris went in for a check up. She had been feeling a little tired, but didn't think anything of it. A biopsy revealed that her leukemia was back. Fortunately, doctors had been searching for a stem-cell donor since Kris first started her treatment in 2003, so they had a match for her. With the progression of the cancer, she needed to start treatment immediately. She went home for a week, and tried to decide if she wanted to go through the treatment again. She finally decided to do it so she could see her son graduate from high school, and Kris spent all of the holidays as well as her birthday in the hospital. I would visit her as often as I could, even if it was just to bring her some lip balm or a crossword puzzle. We would watch TV together and talk about her son's college plans. Some days were so bad for her I would only be able to write a message on the dry erase board in her room letting her know I had been there. It was so hard to see her like that; I was so worried she wouldn't make it. She had the maximum amount of radiation with her first transplant, so this time was all chemotherapy which made her really sick. She was worried her transplant wouldn't work (and so were we) but it did. She fought like crazy, didn't give up, and came home shortly after her birthday at the beginning of January.

In late January, Kris wasn't feeling well again. A high fever put her back in the hospital with an infection in her Hickman catheter and bacterial pneumonia. This time, Kris spent 45 more days in the hospital. It was really scary but she's been home for a couple of weeks now. Last week she got her biopsy results: All clear!

During Kris' second round of treatment, we were thinking about how she said she would never go through it again. At the end of the marathon in 2004, we said we would never do it again because it was the hardest thing we had ever done. To see Kris' strength as she goes through all this is amazing. So we decided if she could do it twice, so could we. And this time, we are going to try to get twice as much in donations!

We were overjoyed by the kind words of support for Kris and for all the donations that came in from all over the world. Every single dollar makes a difference, and every single comment and e-mail helped lift Kris' spirits. Her doctors told us in 2004 that she was a fighter; she told us on several occasions that she was fighting so hard because she didn't want to let down all the people who were pulling for her. It was incredible to see how many people were willing to be a part of something so great. We have a donation page set up through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. We only have a couple of months to reach our donation goal. Please help us reach it as we prepare for the marathon in San Diego on June 4th.

I'll drop in here from time to time with more Comments from the Wife, to update you all on fundraising and our training progress (We're way behind. Someone tell my husband to step away from the computer and exercise more!) Wil is going to have some in-person fundraisers in Los Angeles, and at least one charity poker tournament at PokerStars, so watch for that, too.

Thank you so much!!

-Anne

Note from Wil: The original "Comments from the Wife" posts are: 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.0. (Yeah, we just went for an entirely new version after 3.7, because we, uh, found a new version of the working-it-out software in the CVS and decided to, uh, recompile the . . . uhm . . . unit. Yeah.)

bleating and babbling

From the time I was old enough to recognize that music is important, I've gone through these phases where a certain band will jam a guitar into the base of my skull and twist around there until I listen to them enough to fill my brains with their music and push the guitar (which is usually a Les Paul, and occasionally a Fender Stratocaster) out.

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you can see when this happens, because it's usually revealed in the titles of my entries. There have been Radiohead and Pixies and Get Up Kids and Mike Doughty explosions, but the one band I've come back to over and over again since I was in high school is Pink Floyd.

It was Pink Floyd who introduced me to the concept album, and showed me that music could be something more than background noise. I'll never forget the first time I heard Animals: I was working on a show called Monsters, which was a cool little Tales From the Darkside-ish anthology show. My episode was really cool: it was called Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites, and was about two barbers who do all sorts of unspeakably horrible things to feed a creepy blood-sucking Lovecraftian monster. We filmed the whole thing in a tiny little warehouse-ish building down near the center of Hollywood (I think it was off Santa Monica, between Highland and Gower, but I'm not sure) over the course of about a week in 1990.

I played opposite Matt LeBlanc in that show. To illustrate how weird Hollywood is: Matt was new to town and the entertainment industry, and though he was older than me, I was the veteran actor. I was also a Really Big Deal at the time (though the slow-but-sure slide down to the C list had already begun) and it's this moment in time where you can see the graphs of our careers cross: he was rising and I was falling. Weird, isn't it?

Matt was a relly nice guy, and a lot of fun to work with. He's also singularly responsible for introducing me to The Simpsons. I remember sitting in his dressing room between setups one day, talking about TV shows, and he asked me if I'd seen it. I told him that I'd watched one or two episodes, and I wasn't particularly impressed (if you look at season one of The Simpsons, I think you'll agree that it was a very acquired taste back then.)

He was surprised, because we'd been talking about Monty Python and Life in Hell, and other types of off-beat humor, and he was convinced that I'd like the show. To prove this to me, he recreated the entire episode where Bart is sent to France and ends up slaving away in the vineyard.

I couldn't tell you a single thing about working on that episode (other than being afraid I was going to cut myself with a straight razor) but I can still close my eyes and hear Matt saying, "Don't eat ze grapes, Bart!" I thought it was so hilarious, I gave The Simpsons a chance, and was hooked pretty quickly after that.

But this post was originally about Pink Floyd, right? I was already into Pink Floyd a little bit by this time, and a casual fan of The Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here. I don't remember how I ended up with Animals, but I had the CD and a portable CD player (kids: way back in 1990, before the advent of MP3 players, your parents carried around CD players which were very portable at around five pounds each. We also carried around ten or twenty CDs at a time, in a wallet sort of thing. And we listened to our CDs while we walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to school because we liked it.)

At this point in the story, I feel compelled to point out that, even though I love Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead, I'm not a stoner, and never have been. Stoners bug the everlivingfuck out of me, and nothing makes me leave a party or event faster than a bunch of pot heads. I also feel compelled to point out that the so-called War on Drugs is an abject and total failure (much like the Bush adminstration) and I fully support changing a lot of our drug laws here, especially de-criminalizing marijuana, mmmkay?  And I now feel further compelled to point out that I'm not casting judgement on stoners. I know plenty of stoners who I genuinely like a whole bunch; I just don't come out to play when they're sparking up.

Anyway, I had Animals on CD, and though I was initially turned off by Pigs on the Wing (part one), Dogs grabbed my attention, and by the time Pigs (three different ones) started, I was completely hooked. (After a few listens, I grew to love Pigs on the Wing (I & II) and even taught myself how to play it on the guitar. I can't imagine Animals without those beautiful and tender songs wrapping up the rest of the album.)

I clearly recall leaning back in this shitty chair with wobbly legs, my feet up on a standard-issue office furniture desk, eyes closed, and nearly falling over when Roger Waters sang,

Big man, pig man, ha ha, charade you are
You well heeled big wheel, ha ha, charade you are

I crossed a Rubicon. I don't know what it was about those lyrics (they're not even the lyrics that resonate strongest with me from that album, let alone the entire Floyd catalogue) but the music,  the way he sang "ha ha, charade you are!" and the deep, dark, rich ominous weight of the whole thing spoke to me in exactly the right way. I guess it's kind of sad that, at 19, I was already deeply cynical and responsive to that, huh? After work that day, I went to the record store (kids: it's sort of like iTunes Music Store, but you walk into it and talk to people about what you want to buy, and occasionally disscover new and interesting music while you're there) and bought every Pink Floyd album they had. I entered an extended Pink Floyd phase, where I spent hours just listening to and exploring the music. We didn't have Wikipedia back then, so I went on several record store quests to find old magazines and books about the band, so I could get a better idea where their music came from and what they were all about.

Last night, listened to Animals and Wish You Were Here while I chased album notes and band history down the Internets' rabbit hole (start here if you're intrigued) including a re-examination of The Publius Enigma.

I wish a band would come out and be the modern equivalent to Pink Floyd. Green Day kind of did it with American Idiot, but that's a hell of a stretch, I think. I want to hear concept albums that tell me a story from start to finish, that aren't single-oriented.

Heh. I guess I'm saying that I'm still waiting for Radiohead to follow-up OK Computer. It's a long way to go, isn't it?

 

Oh, and I made this post in Performancing. (Then I did a little tweaking by hand, to add the image and clean up the tags.) Cool.

Technorati Tags: wheaton, pink floyd