Metal Monday

YouTube Obsession

Where were you when you first heard the word “Podcast?”

I was watching an episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation and the character Toby Issacs was releasing a vitriolic ‘podcast’ on ‘iTunes’ about his friend CJ’s murder from a gang shooting. Yeah, Canadian teen melodramas go there.

What I’m saying is Degrassi: TNG is the culture.

Starting every sentence with “Hey Mister Pedophile…” now.

The entire series is free for your own trip memory lane. I’m mostly familiar with the first few seasons, so it’s been fun to revel in the early 00’s of it all.

Watching

Most Dads at some point get into WWII history. Well I know when the time comes for me to retire to my den with a large history book, my historical war subject of choice will most likely be Napoleon.

I find the guy fascinating. My first ever cultural contact with the character of Napoleon was Verne Troyer’s depiction from the Bruce Campbell vehicle Jack of All Trades.

Also, you should watch Jack of All Trades.

Since then, I’ve passively ingested Napoleon non-fiction media to the point where I have a loose, but better than average, knowledge of his history.

So of course when I found out my neighborhood theater, The Vista, would be showing Ridley Scott’s Napoleon on 70mm film, I jumped at the chance to see it on Thanksgiving.

First off, I find most of Ridley Scott’s films have little or nothing to say and his good movies are mostly vibes and are successes in that they have a palpable style. (In contrast, Tony Scott’s movies are brimming with vitriol and subtext. I could do a whole post on Tony’s movies.)

Napoleon is flat and says nothing. Other than the visual boost it got from being shown on film, it looked exactly like a Apple TV produced series. At least Ridley’s most comparable film and equally vacuous, The Gladiator, had a sense of style, was fun to watch and had a story.

The tag line on all the movie posters I’ve seen for Napoleon is: “He came from nothing, he conquered everything.” It sounds rad af right? Too bad we don’t see any of that story. The best I can describe is that the scenes in Napoleon are vignettes from a documentary about Napoleon without the Ken Burns narration.

Finally, few movies earn their 2.5 hour run time and Napoleon, despite never feeling slow, did not need to be 168 minutes long.

Reading

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi is exactly that. In the introduction, Khalidi, a scholar with Palestinian roots, says he presents facts as unbiased as possible but admits this historical account is subjective. Regardless, I’ve yet to notice any egregious insertion of bias (other than asserting that stealing land from indigenous peoples via violence, subterfuge and political heavy-handedness is, on the whole, a bad thing).

His book also makes clear that what is happening in Palestine is not convoluted, confusing or unprecedented. It is exactly the same goal that zionism has always had since the very beginning: Creating a western-controlled military state in the region.

Listening

I grew up in the middle of nowhere southern Indiana so cable TV was not an option. My father’s solution to get ESPN and SF Giants games was to install a huge ceramic dish in the back yard to steal satellite signals. It worked, for the most part¹, but the channels my sister and I wanted, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and most importantly MTV were signals we could not pick-up.

Instead we got a music video channel called MOR Music. It’s mascot was a appropriately a moose generated using the best computers 1994 could muster and they played a very weird and eclectic assortment of music. Annie Lennox to Alan Jackson, Paul Simon to Tina Turner, you just never knew what was going to show up on MOR Music.

This is where I was introduced to Meatloaf’s I’d do anything for Love.

I was instantly drawn to the weirdness, the gothic stage-play setting, Lorraine Crosby and the CAMP.

The song randomly came on my shuffle the other day and I have been on a Meatloaf kick ever since. Diving deeper into his music than I ever have before, the latent theater kid in me recognizes the theater kid in Meatloaf.

That opening dialog is high DRAMA! I hope someday to recreate this at the alter if I ever get married. It will be a small wedding.

Other Stuff

Straight cis-man discovers camp.

If he saw John Waters’ Serial Mom his head would probably explode.

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¹If I finagled the dish into a precise direction I could watch the Spice Network preview channel which, as you can imagine, was a boon for my teenage hormones.