Born to Live Forever More...

Another week of mild-to-moderate levels of local insanity has past. It definitely feels like summer already, which, combined with other recent developments, has sent my mind time-travelling to my teen years during the mid-80s... My bestest pal (+ sporadic mightyblowhole-poster), da5e, + I used to spend a good deal of time refining our local daytime routine, which involved hitting the local malls + gas stations, hunting for videogames + pinball machines with which to do battle, dropping cash in toystores + comics shops (+ drugstores + grocery stores, cuz back then, comics were sorta ubiquitous + comics shops were rare + treasured establishments that disappeared almost as fast as they opened up), bombing local hilly roads on our skateboards, + listening to metal + punk rock... He's the guy who introduced me to Manowar. Most likely, the song was Dark Avenger offa their 1982 Battle Hymns. That's the one with narration by Orson Welles, cheesy over-the-top narration... about a pretty angry feller name of Dark Avenger + his trusty horse, Black Death... I feel the need to stifle a giggle now, but back in the day, since we had no images of the band + didn't know about the loincloths + swords + such, we thought it was pretty cool stuff, expanding on the rock operas that we dug by Rush + Floyd + their ilk...

Here's a link to the mega-cool AngryChairs blog + their complete uploaded discography of Manowar, and, even better, here's a Manowar post from the Metal Inquisition, detailing a little bit (maybe too much... do I need to know about Joey DeMaio's vegetable selections at the grocery store? ...yeah, kinda, it looks like, cuz I couldn't stop reading...) of the personal lives of the band members. Don't expect any kindnesses from the poster, who seems to be bitter, maybe about having once loved this band, but the band's fans definitely defend 'em in the comments section. Recommended reading, f'sure! My personal take on Manowar is that they were a band I used to listen to when I was a kid. I still have quite a few songs offa their 'good' records on my iPod, +, as a musician who primarily plays bass, can't help but be impresst with much of the basswerk on those early albums. Thmubs-up to the musicianship + dedication to the music, if a nose-holding thumbs-down to loincloths, swords, inflatable stage-dragonry, silly pyrotechnyx, etc... 

Other recentnesses...

Finally got to watch Nightmare Alley, the 1947 film adaptation of the 1946 William Lindsay Gresham novel of the same name, with Tyrone Power as Stanton Carlisle, the young carny whose high aspirations precede an inevitable + interminable fall... This is a pretty classic film noir, + darker than I expected. Power is an excellent lead in this one, playing a next generation carny + acting it nearly sociopathic. Just watch his face when the women of the film - all three of em - talk about love + the like. He just fades away from em without ever moving. When he finally falls as far as he can after getting caught in a pseudo-religious scam, it seems well-deserved. And in the end, he + his Molly seem to've supplanted the previous generation's Zeena + Pete, which is still a great step up from where Stan landed. I dvr'd it off of Fox Movie Channel; knowing their scheduling, it'll prob'ly be on again - numerous times - in the coming weeks. Don't miss out!

And I finally got to start Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, which twists its way thru Ripperology, the psychogeography of London + the strange + surreal world of rare bookdealing. So far, it's excellent + I recommend it, esp to fans of Alan Moore's From Hell... that's From Hell the graphic novel (or the complete scripts, if you can find em... they're almost best as companion to the original + its extensive notes), not the film From Hell. Repeat, not the film. The graphic novel features some incredible work in a realist-style by Eddie Campbell, creator of, among other things, the classic Bacchus comics. Eddie's art style is used as wondrous juxtaposition to the apotheotic + gruesome conjurings of the scripts + makes those moments in the work that much punchier by that stark contrast. Here's a peek at a particularly neat-o panel wherein (the fictional version of) William Gull explains his own personal cosmology:

(But the film couldn't've suckt more balls if it'd been lockt in the drunk tank with a gay biker gang...)