The obligatory 'Odyssey' post.

We saw Christopher Nolan's take on The Odyssey last weekend. It was excellent. Duh. If I had any minor quibble it would be the choice of music playing over the closing credits, but everything prior to that is nigh perfect in its pursuit of epic grandeur balanced by close human moments. 

You know, an epic FILM!

Go see it on a big screen. Don’t get hung up on seeing it in the “perfect format.” Just SEE IT.

POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT—STOP. HERE IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE ODYSSEY YET:

I know, you can’t really spoil a poem that’s thousands of years old, but you can spoil a director’s take that makes that poem personal and introduce a new perspective that skews the commonly understood interpretations. This is beyond stuff left out of the story or condensed for clarity and such. This is a core reframe, and the thing that turns the mythical into the personal which leads to its embrace as a universal.

Sooooooo:

While at first I did find it curious that Christopher Nolan chose to mix his metaphors by taking the stance that Odysseus opened Pandora’s Box by creating the Trojan Horse, it’s a read I could embrace with more emotion than had the story hinged more on Odysseus’ being the mostly unrepentant jerk he comes across in the original poem as he's constantly locked in battle with the gods (so to speak).

Another summertime, funtime (but honestly anytime) song.

Dug through my email to find this very, very 2011 promo photo used by The Color Bars.

I’m a little shocked I never shared this tune here (though I might’ve on Chicagoist back in 2010 or 2011 when it first came out) but it’s in that category of dependable bangers that will always instantaneously lift my mood, no matter how dark it may be.

"Structupoppie Rally" is an extremely sillily-titled song from The Color Bars’ album Prosopopoeia, but it's just got such a gently driving positive lift propelling it from start to finish, and it has yet to no be 100% effective in giving me a positive lift as well. From that opening burbling bass synth with a sassy little squiggly synth atop it, it's a total gas.

Knowledge gaps and learning that when you're a boy you learn how to be a man.

It never astounds me how much I don't know, even about my favorite things. For instance, it wasn't until this week that adult me discovered there was an amazing cover by Rex Smith of David Bowie's "Boy Keep Swinging" that appeared on a 1985 special hosted by Bob Keeshan (a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo) entitled, wait for it, How To Be A Man.* 

In the past few years it's really grown ever more apparent to me that no matter how much stuff you stuff in your noggin or gather as experiences, there will always be acres of the unknown, even about your absolute favorite things, that will make you feel like you don't know anything at all. But the truth is, you can't even be aware of how vast your gaps in knowledge are until you've spent a long time filling those gaps. So it's all a positive thing in the end, even if sometime I feel like an idiot for just discovering a major network special featuring a song by one of my favorite artists of all time that is this distinctly memorable (and delicious).

*Based on the year and topic, there is actually a decent chance I saw this in real time. But if I did, I clearly don't remember it and even if I did I wouldn't have made the Bowie connection 

Perennial is now! Modernism is now!

Perennial play Chicago for the 1st time. Photo by me!

Nora turned me onto Perennial—she's had an awesome glow-in-the-dark t-shirt of theirs since before I met her—and when I first gave them a spin I was impressed with their incredibly tightly packed little Mod bombs of songs. 

A few weeks ago we both finally had a chance to see Perennial live for the first time at a Sunday night show in a DIY space. While I really enjoyed the compact attack of their records, nothing could have prepared me for the explosion I witnessed that night. Onstage, Perennial is still super-duper tight, but they have a lot more freak-beat funk in their live attack, triggering an even stronger urge in everyone to break out into a dance party. Not a single member of the trio remains still for more than a half a second throughout their entire show, and at every beat they seemed in lockstep, tied together by some telepathic bond between the three of them.

Perennial's new album Modernism is out in mid-September, but I pre-ordered it last week despite being sent a download of the album already. Things this good need to live in your home, not your streaming queue.

Please enjoy this Instagram embed and then consider tweaking some of your settings.

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I hadn't even realized that Instagram had turned off post embeds as a default, so I turned it back on and am testing it with this post of photos that went up just before my birthday. I may consider more frequent cross posting of Instagram posts since those have grown to be almost as long as some blog posts in the last year or so. Haha.

But in important related news, Instagram did add a setting allowing people to remix your content using Meta AI and of course they opted everyone into that without asking. So make sure you go into your settings and shut that down ASAP. 

Friction is...good? The start of a thought in progress...

I think there is grave danger in living a frictionless life. Had the internet existed when I was a kid, and I my druthers, I would have absolutely retreated into that space and avoid annoying humans or topics that didn’t directly cater to my existing interests. 

Instead, I had parents who unleashed me upon whatever I could get my hands on and understand from a very early age. They also taught me that many conflicts in life have an easy way out, but that easy way is usually pretty half-assed and ripe for setting up an even larger future conflict. At least in my experience. 

Then again, my experience is based on a being human being that I have learned does not always present predictably to other human beings in a way that feels “normal” to them.

Regardless, I have applied friction to all parts of my life, often choosing the harder road for myself because I know it’s the correct path to take, for me. And don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming this makes me in some way superior to other people who don’t do this since most people I’ve encountered seem to lead simpler, less complicated lives in general. Here “simpler, less complicated” is meant to denote relative states of existence: everyone feels they lead a difficult life because life is, in fact, difficult. 

There are many reasons I am the way I am, many of which I have not publicly explored. And I’m still sorting this out in my own head, after mulling over my perceptions and cross referencing them with other people’s perceptions of me, so for me this is just a tiny thread of a larger tapestry I’ve decided to publicly start pulling at to understand better.

In the end I do sometimes ask myself what I have to show for this approach. I know more than most people, but I certainly don’t seem as happy as most people, so why exactly do I bother constantly making things “more difficult” for myself? I honestly don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that for me I don’t think there ever was a different path I could take.

Reenergized and heading out on a summer stroll.

I’m coming off a week staycation that was lovely, even if I didn’t feel the creative juices start to flow more freely until…sometime last Sunday afternoon. 

It took me a week of trying to “relax” and focus on more freewheeling creative endeavors before I actually could. Just in time to go back to work and have to give up that newfound mental space as it’s reallocated from personal pleasure to professional pursuits. 

I’m still feeling pretty good though! So to keep the energy moving in a positive direction here’s another tune I think is woefully under appreciated. 

Cretin Stompers’ “Cowboy From Mars” has a real ‘70s-stylee-by-way-of-Lenny-Kravitz groove buried under piles built on shards of distortion. It’s the kind of song that could have been delivered cleanly as a pop hit, but instead chose to bury the pop in chaos. This latter approach allows the song to burrow in and catch a deeper hold as your brain tried to pick out the hook or fish out the melody. But once that brain locks in, the song turns technicolor and you hear everything that was buried in there. 

You’re hooked.