Confession:
I once was a huge comic book junkie.
I still have, somewhere, a large portion of those comics I once collected (and hell, maybe some were good investments. Anyone know if Wizard is still the go-to source for a comic's value?) likely stored away in bags, with the cardboard backers, in boxes in a storage place.
It was somewhere around 4th or 5th grade that this started. I'd loved the funny pages since I was a wee lad, and vividly remember that I learned the word doubt (and how it doesn't sound a damn think like it's pronounced) from a Garfield collection in 1st grade.
Like most boys with basic TV access growing up when I did, I was a huge junkie for GI Joe and Transformers. Then one afternoon I saw that they had comics too (this was likely at a gas station, and a few years before my attention would be drawn to that rack of magazines wrapped in plastic). I'm not sure if I was able to convince my folks to get one for me on the first try, but it eventually happened.
Throw the kid an allowance, and I was soon blowing the whole thing on comics.
I even drew some of my own (I had better artistic/drawing talent then--it has since atrophied). I had no clue what the actual creative process was for most comics, so I went the difficult direct route of making it up as I went a long mostly, and drawing random layouts on a page before filling them in. There's a reason I didn't grow up to be Frank Miller or Jim Lee or Todd McFarland.
It lasted pretty much until puberty. I'd like to say women replaced comic books, but I was skinny (like "hey, I can see ribs" skinny) about a decade and a half before skinny dudes were "cool". Plus there was the whole braces thing, and the acne. Let's not talk about that.
Guitar (and guitar-related magazines, with interviews I'm damn glad my parents never read--I don't think they'd see Dimebag from Pantera as a good influence) quickly replaced comic books by 7th grade. The comics got boxed up, rarely looked at, and that was that.
Until a few months back.
I saw that there was a "Season 8" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I was such an unabashed fan of that I once attempted to write a script, and actually got far enough in the process that I was looking for a way to submit it (and of course, found out that Whedon and Co. don't take unsolicited scripts--damn. I though a special "Spring Break Buffy where the Scoobies get to take on a Chthulu cult was good times.) But the catch to Season 8 was it was in comic form. I passed at first.
Then one day I saw the first few issues collected in graphic novel form at Borders, said "what the hell" and I've been hooked ever since.
It's a great season so far (and I have my own theory about the identity of the masked Big Bad, Twilight, but I'm keeping it largely to myself) and the first 10 or so issues are now in two graphic novels. But this might make me a comic geek again...
Showing posts with label I am old. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I am old. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
10 Years Gone
Just got the offical message about my 10 year HS reunion.
Will I go?
At this point I've got no idea (when and where it is will be a big deciding factor.)
It feels odd though. I spent my first five years outside of HS at UGA, then I spent another year in Athens working various crap jobs, a year back home in the 'burbs working various crap jobs, then two more years back in Athens working various crap jobs before moving back to the ATL and (eventually) landing a non crap job.
Late last fall I was carded trying to buy a lotto ticket. I've got all my hair (and then some--the only time my hair's been longer was the summer after my freshman year of high school, and even then there wasn't as much because it was styled in that unfortunate, "shaved underneath, but long on top" look.)
I'm getting close to being in the best shape of my life (22-23 when I was going to Ramsey 6x a week is the peak, but I barely did cardio then.)
I can say "oh, I work for a software company in Buckhead" when someone asks what I do for a living. I also play in a pretty good band.
But man do I not want to revisit the peak of social awkwardness that the high school me was. I'm not that kid, and I don't want to be that kid.
Maybe there'll be an open bar...
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Apparently "No Longer On The Air" Also Means "Everything Alternative."
Ok, so I've not exactly been the biggest supporter of Atlanta's "only alternative" station, 99X, in the recent past, but I didn't want to see the station totally disappear from the airwaves.
By the end of next week, if I turn to 99.7 on my car radio, I'll get the station formerly known as Q100, and the same crappy playlist.
Now, 99X's playlist of late has been pretty poor, and had been terrible for a while (though I am apparently in the minority at finding Fred Toucher's wannabe Howard Stern shtick tiresome, they did have Butch Walker in for great and hilarious in-studio appearances--particularly the morning Butch cleaned house on Rock-And-Roll Jeopardy--which is far better than much of what they've trotted out lately) but to kick the whole station off the air to compete with the the All T-Pain, All the Time stylings of 95.5 The Beat?
Well, let's break this down, pseudo-Julius Caesar-style: First I will bury 99X--or at least point out the many ways they went wrong--then transition into some things they didn't have control playing a factor. And then grab your hankies because there'll be some nostalgic praise for the "good ol' days."
First, let's go back to that morning show. Now maybe I'm alone in this, but when I turn to an FM station billed as playing music, what I most want to hear is: music. Politics? Well there's WSB and NPR for that. Sports? 680 The Fan and 790 the Zone have that covered. What I don't really give much of a crap about in the morning:
Whether or not Crash Clark contracted any number of sexual diseases from desperate women at American Pie.
Hearing some potentially abused-in-her-childhood wanna-be softcore porn starlet kiss up to Fred Toucher while desperate guys called into a half-ass version of the Dating Game.
Hearing clips and commentary from the crappy shows watched by the guy who sounded like Jimmy but was actually Jenner's wife.
Reading the headlines off TMZ.com and passing them off as "Celebrity Sleaze" in between what this past fall was near constant plugging for the website's pseudo-ET show on Fox.
I remember the original Morning X (the Barnes, Leslie, and Jimmy version) being better, but that could just be because it was years and years ago...and the Big Day Outs then were massively better. When you can see a show with Beck and 311 for under $20, you tend to care less when Barnes spends half an hour talking about his tennis game.
But overall...I'd like to just hear music in the morning. 95.5 does sort of grasp this concept, as the few times I've been bored enough by other stations on the dial they seem to almost always have music on. Downside: they seem to have a 10-songs maximum playlist and since summer at least 30% must have T-Pain involved in some way (it used to be Akon.)
But it's not as simple as "play more music, less talk." The playlist for 99X is probably the largest factor in their demise. It can't look good to either advertisers or listeners with any functioning memory when the promo announces "99X: NEW MUSIC" and then starts playing "Come as you are" (a song now over 15 years old) or something by The Cure (which in some cases would be more than two decades old.)
Trying to have it both ways playlist-wise seems to lead to death for rock stations in Atlanta. How do you play to the nostalgia for the music you started out on, and play new artists or new songs?
The easy answer is to blame Cumulus Media for being to hard-headed, compared to the relative open-mindness of Susquehana (the previous station owners). But the playlist started turning at least semi-sour long before Cumulus came along in 2005-2006. Remember, they were the station that kept playing Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit (and worse, Creed) long after most of the music-listening world realized what massive tools Durst and Scott Stapp were.
(By the way, I'm not doing all of this from memory--much of the info here is coming from the 99X Wikipedia page, which I highly recommend, if only to take a nice guided jog down memory lane.)
Perhaps 99X's problem is merely synecdochic of larger problems--in the major label music industry, and in so-called "modern rock" radio in particular. Overall, the trends in album sales across the board point down. Music execs would be best served to quickly forget those heady days of the late 90s/early 2000s when a #1 release would move enough copies to be certified platinum after one week's time. Now if you can sell 30,000 copies of an artist's new CD in a week: welcome to the Billboard Top 10. Now the potential reasons for this (blame piracy--no blame the recession--no blame the fact that many of the CDs released and hyped just aren't that good) deserve there own post, so I won't get into them further. But people are buying less CDs, and in particular, there haven't been any real new "rock" artists to break through at all in the past few years.
Disagree? Well take a look at the current Modern Rock charts. A good 3/4ths of that list is artists who were around when I was in college (dating myself note: I'm class of 2003--so five years ago) and standbys like the Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been around for even longer. The list of "new rock" grows slimmer still when you realize that some of these bands are just leftovers of late-90s acts (Angels and Airwaves and +44 are remnants of Blink 182.) Maybe the likes of Pitchfork's favorites and "blog bands" are too esoteric (or in the case of some blog bands, just plain shitty) to play on the air. But why did Modest Mouse suddenly get radio airplay 4 years ago and I've never heard 99X play The Arcade Fire? What chance does an "alternative" station have when the OC soundtracks were far more eclectic and interesting? And most of these songs can't be dismissed on bad production values or length either. Songs I'd classify as "alternative" that I thing should be on a radio somewhere right now, off the top of my head:
Athlete - "Airport Disco" (Coldplay if they remembered how to occasionally rock out, and were a lot sexier, musically.)
Augie March - "One Crowded Hour" (it was the song of the year for Triple J in Australia and their musical tastes aren't that different from our own.)
Dredg - "Zebraskin"
Devin Townsend Band - "Vampira" (well, really better around halloween).
The Bastard Suns - "My Pint"
Groove Stain - "With You" (gotta give props to some neglected local rock bands...99X should've played more Trances Arc and Second Shift as well.)
Dragonforce - "through fire and flames" (thousands of Guitar Hero 3 fans would like it anway.)
Butch Walker - and song of "The Rise and Fall Of..." off 1969's website, or the demos off his myspace. 99X and The Marvelous 3 used to be like this, and unlike the station, Butch is still kicking it as hard as he ever did.
Pure Reason Revolution - "Nimos and Tambos" killer male-female harmonies
Anything by Ryan Adams or Rilo Kiley (sorry, was cheating a bit and scanning my iTunes list...but the I can't recall either being played on 99X, and for that matter I don't remember hearing Damien Rice since Cumulus bought the station and ended the iPod weekends.)
In short: it looks to me (and the folks at Idolator) that modern rock is dying as it breaks no new artists, ticks off listeners looking for something new by going down the nostalgia road, and generally limiting its potentially vast playlist for the same ready-made mix of Foo Fighters and VH1-Classic approved tracks off Nirvana's Nevermind. Maybe the "internet only" 99x will learn something from this.
(And now I look up and see things are getting a bit unwieldy here, so come back later for the happy and nostalgic part 2.)
By the end of next week, if I turn to 99.7 on my car radio, I'll get the station formerly known as Q100, and the same crappy playlist.
Now, 99X's playlist of late has been pretty poor, and had been terrible for a while (though I am apparently in the minority at finding Fred Toucher's wannabe Howard Stern shtick tiresome, they did have Butch Walker in for great and hilarious in-studio appearances--particularly the morning Butch cleaned house on Rock-And-Roll Jeopardy--which is far better than much of what they've trotted out lately) but to kick the whole station off the air to compete with the the All T-Pain, All the Time stylings of 95.5 The Beat?
Well, let's break this down, pseudo-Julius Caesar-style: First I will bury 99X--or at least point out the many ways they went wrong--then transition into some things they didn't have control playing a factor. And then grab your hankies because there'll be some nostalgic praise for the "good ol' days."
First, let's go back to that morning show. Now maybe I'm alone in this, but when I turn to an FM station billed as playing music, what I most want to hear is: music. Politics? Well there's WSB and NPR for that. Sports? 680 The Fan and 790 the Zone have that covered. What I don't really give much of a crap about in the morning:
Whether or not Crash Clark contracted any number of sexual diseases from desperate women at American Pie.
Hearing some potentially abused-in-her-childhood wanna-be softcore porn starlet kiss up to Fred Toucher while desperate guys called into a half-ass version of the Dating Game.
Hearing clips and commentary from the crappy shows watched by the guy who sounded like Jimmy but was actually Jenner's wife.
Reading the headlines off TMZ.com and passing them off as "Celebrity Sleaze" in between what this past fall was near constant plugging for the website's pseudo-ET show on Fox.
I remember the original Morning X (the Barnes, Leslie, and Jimmy version) being better, but that could just be because it was years and years ago...and the Big Day Outs then were massively better. When you can see a show with Beck and 311 for under $20, you tend to care less when Barnes spends half an hour talking about his tennis game.
But overall...I'd like to just hear music in the morning. 95.5 does sort of grasp this concept, as the few times I've been bored enough by other stations on the dial they seem to almost always have music on. Downside: they seem to have a 10-songs maximum playlist and since summer at least 30% must have T-Pain involved in some way (it used to be Akon.)
But it's not as simple as "play more music, less talk." The playlist for 99X is probably the largest factor in their demise. It can't look good to either advertisers or listeners with any functioning memory when the promo announces "99X: NEW MUSIC" and then starts playing "Come as you are" (a song now over 15 years old) or something by The Cure (which in some cases would be more than two decades old.)
Trying to have it both ways playlist-wise seems to lead to death for rock stations in Atlanta. How do you play to the nostalgia for the music you started out on, and play new artists or new songs?
The easy answer is to blame Cumulus Media for being to hard-headed, compared to the relative open-mindness of Susquehana (the previous station owners). But the playlist started turning at least semi-sour long before Cumulus came along in 2005-2006. Remember, they were the station that kept playing Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit (and worse, Creed) long after most of the music-listening world realized what massive tools Durst and Scott Stapp were.
(By the way, I'm not doing all of this from memory--much of the info here is coming from the 99X Wikipedia page, which I highly recommend, if only to take a nice guided jog down memory lane.)
Perhaps 99X's problem is merely synecdochic of larger problems--in the major label music industry, and in so-called "modern rock" radio in particular. Overall, the trends in album sales across the board point down. Music execs would be best served to quickly forget those heady days of the late 90s/early 2000s when a #1 release would move enough copies to be certified platinum after one week's time. Now if you can sell 30,000 copies of an artist's new CD in a week: welcome to the Billboard Top 10. Now the potential reasons for this (blame piracy--no blame the recession--no blame the fact that many of the CDs released and hyped just aren't that good) deserve there own post, so I won't get into them further. But people are buying less CDs, and in particular, there haven't been any real new "rock" artists to break through at all in the past few years.
Disagree? Well take a look at the current Modern Rock charts. A good 3/4ths of that list is artists who were around when I was in college (dating myself note: I'm class of 2003--so five years ago) and standbys like the Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been around for even longer. The list of "new rock" grows slimmer still when you realize that some of these bands are just leftovers of late-90s acts (Angels and Airwaves and +44 are remnants of Blink 182.) Maybe the likes of Pitchfork's favorites and "blog bands" are too esoteric (or in the case of some blog bands, just plain shitty) to play on the air. But why did Modest Mouse suddenly get radio airplay 4 years ago and I've never heard 99X play The Arcade Fire? What chance does an "alternative" station have when the OC soundtracks were far more eclectic and interesting? And most of these songs can't be dismissed on bad production values or length either. Songs I'd classify as "alternative" that I thing should be on a radio somewhere right now, off the top of my head:
Athlete - "Airport Disco" (Coldplay if they remembered how to occasionally rock out, and were a lot sexier, musically.)
Augie March - "One Crowded Hour" (it was the song of the year for Triple J in Australia and their musical tastes aren't that different from our own.)
Dredg - "Zebraskin"
Devin Townsend Band - "Vampira" (well, really better around halloween).
The Bastard Suns - "My Pint"
Groove Stain - "With You" (gotta give props to some neglected local rock bands...99X should've played more Trances Arc and Second Shift as well.)
Dragonforce - "through fire and flames" (thousands of Guitar Hero 3 fans would like it anway.)
Butch Walker - and song of "The Rise and Fall Of..." off 1969's website, or the demos off his myspace. 99X and The Marvelous 3 used to be like this, and unlike the station, Butch is still kicking it as hard as he ever did.
Pure Reason Revolution - "Nimos and Tambos" killer male-female harmonies
Anything by Ryan Adams or Rilo Kiley (sorry, was cheating a bit and scanning my iTunes list...but the I can't recall either being played on 99X, and for that matter I don't remember hearing Damien Rice since Cumulus bought the station and ended the iPod weekends.)
In short: it looks to me (and the folks at Idolator) that modern rock is dying as it breaks no new artists, ticks off listeners looking for something new by going down the nostalgia road, and generally limiting its potentially vast playlist for the same ready-made mix of Foo Fighters and VH1-Classic approved tracks off Nirvana's Nevermind. Maybe the "internet only" 99x will learn something from this.
(And now I look up and see things are getting a bit unwieldy here, so come back later for the happy and nostalgic part 2.)
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
99X: You Call That Big?
Since I misplaced my CD case in the middle of last week, and as I'm possible the only liberal-leaning, college-degree-holding twentysomething in all of Georgia that doesn't own an iPod, I spent an inordinate amount of commute- and lunch time listening to the radio.
The first thing that struck me is that there is a cosmetic surgery center that specializes in varicose vein reduction/elimination. They're called Vein Solutions and this name is spoken without a hint of irony or shame or anything on their radio ads.
The second, and larger point, is that I think 99X, the station that was #1 on my radio preset (kids, ask your parents/older siblings) throughout high school (and its predecessor Power 99 before it), well, WNNX seems to not have the pull it once did.
Why?
Check out the line-up for the reconstituted Big Day Out.
Needless to say, it's not on my list of concerts to attend.
I remember attending the last Big Day Out I attended, back in the fall of 1998, at the Conyers Horse Park, and it had multiple stages and included everything from radio-friendly (and still played even on Star94) fare like the Goo-Goo Dolls to underground-faves-turned-one-hit-wonders like The Urge, and of course Fuel, which it should be noted to any budding biographers was my favorite band at the time (pretty much from the first time I heard the demo/Porcelain version of "Shimmer" on).
Other years included big-time names like Beck and 311 (on the same bill no less, and after Odelay had been released), and the last Big Out I attended, while back at lakewood, still had a second stage (Linkin Park and Incubus and Disturbed all played the second stage) while Green Day and Stone Temple Pilots hit the main stage.
So color me underwhelmed with Chris Cornell and Interpol and...who cares really. I keep hoping at least a side stage will be added (side note: my first time seeing LFT live was at that massive two-stage Lakewood BDO.)
I guess I'm a bit sad too. I had many great times (not all of which I can easily remember) at BDOs of years past. The whole thing started after 99X more or less broke Silverchair to US audiences (one of the DJs picked up an EP with "Tomorrow" on it in Austrailia and played it.) I don't think Silverchair's US live debut was at the first American Big Day Out (it's been the Coachella/Lollapallooza of the outback for years and years), but that first BDO, waaaay back in 1995 was my first festival show. It was good. The other BDOs were good. The current one...well...maybe cutting ties with Clear Channel has drawbacks beyond the freedom to replace Jimmy Baron with a clone that sounds just like him and the freedom to old Nirvana songs at a frequency dangerously approaching 96 Rock's tendancies towards old Ozzy songs...
The first thing that struck me is that there is a cosmetic surgery center that specializes in varicose vein reduction/elimination. They're called Vein Solutions and this name is spoken without a hint of irony or shame or anything on their radio ads.
The second, and larger point, is that I think 99X, the station that was #1 on my radio preset (kids, ask your parents/older siblings) throughout high school (and its predecessor Power 99 before it), well, WNNX seems to not have the pull it once did.
Why?
Check out the line-up for the reconstituted Big Day Out.
Needless to say, it's not on my list of concerts to attend.
I remember attending the last Big Day Out I attended, back in the fall of 1998, at the Conyers Horse Park, and it had multiple stages and included everything from radio-friendly (and still played even on Star94) fare like the Goo-Goo Dolls to underground-faves-turned-one-hit-wonders like The Urge, and of course Fuel, which it should be noted to any budding biographers was my favorite band at the time (pretty much from the first time I heard the demo/Porcelain version of "Shimmer" on).
Other years included big-time names like Beck and 311 (on the same bill no less, and after Odelay had been released), and the last Big Out I attended, while back at lakewood, still had a second stage (Linkin Park and Incubus and Disturbed all played the second stage) while Green Day and Stone Temple Pilots hit the main stage.
So color me underwhelmed with Chris Cornell and Interpol and...who cares really. I keep hoping at least a side stage will be added (side note: my first time seeing LFT live was at that massive two-stage Lakewood BDO.)
I guess I'm a bit sad too. I had many great times (not all of which I can easily remember) at BDOs of years past. The whole thing started after 99X more or less broke Silverchair to US audiences (one of the DJs picked up an EP with "Tomorrow" on it in Austrailia and played it.) I don't think Silverchair's US live debut was at the first American Big Day Out (it's been the Coachella/Lollapallooza of the outback for years and years), but that first BDO, waaaay back in 1995 was my first festival show. It was good. The other BDOs were good. The current one...well...maybe cutting ties with Clear Channel has drawbacks beyond the freedom to replace Jimmy Baron with a clone that sounds just like him and the freedom to old Nirvana songs at a frequency dangerously approaching 96 Rock's tendancies towards old Ozzy songs...
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