Author: Ridley

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. Fear of a Black Planet closes out an block of albums from 1989 and 1990 on this list. I remember the first time I heard it, at Stefan Boyle’s apartment after work. He knew I was in to Nine Inch Nails and he couldn’t wait to play the PE record for me, figuring I’d like it. I did, and would up buy myself a copy the next day.  The first word that comes to mind when trying to describe Fear of a Black Planet is “challenging.” I wasn’t especially in to hip-hop, primarily because I wasn’t impressed with most of the backing tracks. “Welcome to the Terrordome” just blew me completely away. It was immaculately produced, in your face, with a deft use of sampling that put most industrial acts to shame. And Chuck D’s lyrics and delivery on that song? I’m not exaggerating when I say I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anything that powerful. Fear of a Black Planet gets up in your face and dares you to call rap frivolous, defies you to say that it does anything but rock. In hindsight, I’m not even sure that it’s a better record than It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, but it’s the one that introduced me to the hard rhymer. Did it have an impact? Yeah, you could say that.      

I will return to my list of “10” albums shortly, but we’ve done some camping recently and I wanted to share a few photos before too much time passed. Last weekend we spent a couple days at McKinney Falls State Park which is in southeast Austin, and Garner State Park, about an hour west of San Antonio. Here’s our basic camping setup when we’re prepared for rain. It is a good thing we ready, too, as it would have  been pretty uncomfortable without it.  Garner is a pretty special place. Apparently, I’m late to the game on this one because everyone I’ve mentioned it to has said it’s their favorite of the Texas state parks. It’s in the middle of the hill country, that little bit of Texas that isn’t flat and covered with wheat or grass that looks a lot like wheat. The first full day we stayed there, it misted all night and stayed foggy until the sun burned off the clouds in the early afternoon.I’m a sucker for “water drops on things that don’t normally have water drops on them” photos, so there many, many more than I’ve posted here.   The fog makes the hills seem a lot taller than they are, but an 1800′ peak is pretty tall for central Texas, particularly when it’s rising out of the Frio river canyon. The camping space we had backed directly up to one of the taller hills and I bounded (note: “bounded” is an absurd exaggeration of the level of spryness I exhibited that morning, but it felt distinctly bound-y) out of our campsite and up, up, up. We took a couple of the more remote trails, including one that was the old road into the park, letting the mist keep us cool. When the sun broke through, we were treated to an altogether different park. We left the hills and hiked down to a trail down by the river. The Frio was true to its name; cold, as well as swift and clear. We were lucky enough to have booked our trip during the 15 minutes between winter and summer when the trees are at their peak. We couldn’t have planned it better to get those bright green leaves intermingled with the darker, older live oak leaves.  The funny thing is that, while we had a fantastic time, we didn’t even do some of the most popular activities at the park. The Frio is dammed at the southern end of the park, set up for tubing and, just below the dam, is the park’s signature hill, Old Baldy. We missed out on that, as well as the food trucks, the miniature golf, and the dance hall. Guess we’ll have to go back, huh? P.S. Yes, that’s a picture of a turkey. The Rio Grande turkey is abundant in the park.  McKinney Falls doesn’t have the same abundance of water features and topography, but it’s a nice park, nearby, and it’s where we got married, so it has a lot going for it. In case you were wondering, late May is a dodgy time to camp in Texas. Sometimes, its lovely, but it can be very hot or very wet. Or both, as was the case last weekend. It’s still well worth the trip. Nicole was clever enough to get us one of those tents that is all mesh above 30″ or so, so we had a little breeze at night. We didn’t really move around much except at dusk and dawn, but as it turns out, those are great times to take pictures. You may notice a picture or two where, lacking a proper polarizing filter, I just put my sunglasses over the lens. Worked a treat, too.  The blue-tinted photo is a weird one. I took that one at night. We had little blue LEDs strung over the edge of the umbrella, and the fairy lights were reflecting off of the flashlight’s lens in a really pretty way. It was better in person, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.  Funny thing: I didn’t really enjoy camping when I was a kid. There were some good times, but it was mostly something to be endured until I could get back home to my…well, we didn’t have computers or video games or anything, but I’m sure there was something I was eager to get back to. Now? I get it. We can take off on a Friday afternoon and spend two nights at a park and it feels longer and more relaxing than a month of weekends at home. I’m a lucky SOB in that Nicole not only enjoys it, she enjoys it in much the way that I do. Oh, and we can camp-cook like nobody’s business.  Hope you enjoyed the pics. This is my first time to use the slideshow function, so…will it work? Let’s find out! -RK

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. Oh, They Might Be Giants. What would I do without you? I’ve seen TMBG 14 times so far (I think), and they never fail to delight. I was already a fan when this album came out. Both They Might Be Giants and Lincoln were in heavy rotation on my cassette player, but it was Flood that turned the band into a life-long obsession for me.  The first two records were quirky, awkward, and not quite fully-formed. Flood was a silly masterpiece from start to finish. It’s a confident album, with some of the rough edges of their earlier work smoothed out, but with just as much (if not more) giddy glee.  Fandom was weird back in those pre-internet days. The only way to find out which songs would be fan favorites was to go to the shows and see what the fans reacted to. “Particle Man” was a huge favorite of mine, but I had no idea how loved that song was until I saw the Arcadia Theater bouncing up and down to it back in 1990.  There’s a personal reason for loving this album, too: My mother used to sing a silly song to me before bed when I was a wee one. The song was “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, so when I first heard it on Flood, I couldn’t believe it. I love this band, and this album in particular, so, so very much.

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. Pretty Hate Machine was always going to be on here, wasn’t it? There was a pretty long period of time where it was almost the only thing I would listen to. It was the first album I was aware of that successfully merged industrial with dance with rock with the kind of “feeling sorry for yourself” that would have made Morrissey blush. I first heard “Down In It” at the Dallas dance clubs in the summer of 1989, but the album didn’t come out until November. The intervening months gave me plenty of opportunity to blow my expectations sky high and, somehow, Pretty Hate Machine exceeded them. There wasn’t a song on the album I didn’t love, a feat that wouldn’t be matched until….sometime later in this list. NIN never made another album anything like this one. Adrian Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc, Al Jourgensen, John Fryer, and Flood all worked on the production, which sounds like it could be a mess, but it all came together in a seamless whole with slinky dance groove underpinnings. Subsequent albums tended to be more aggressive and/or abstract, which is great, but wildly different in texture to the debut. Did it make an impact? Lordy, yes. Pretty Hate Machine was a lifestyle for me; it was an identity I didn’t know I was looking for. I wouldn’t stop talking about the damned thing. I went through more Rit black dye during this era than the rest of my life combined. It was an absolutely glorious time.

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. This is the album that Sigue Sigue Sputnik wish they’d made. It still sounds like an artifact from the future. Imagine the impact in 1989, 6 months before Pretty Hate Machine hit the shelves. I don’t know that any album ever took the cut-and-paste approach to making music to this extent.  It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Melding rapping to samples of metal guitar riffs and industrial beats, chock full o’ pop culture references both in the lyrics and the samples, it careens out of of control like a car that’s lost its brakes and is always this close to crashing.  Sadly, I never got to see PWEI. They were set to open for NIN but left the tour two weeks before the show in Dallas. In a sense, that might be for the best. Day/Hour/This was a revolutionary album, but the collage approach may not have worked as well in a live setting.  Was it influential? Enormously so. This was the album that brought hard rock into industrial for me, and hey, can walk talk for a moment about the aesthetic of the band? Look at that album cover. All of their merch was just as immaculately put together. *sigh* At least the singer is doing pretty well with his PWEI career.

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. A co-worker at the music store recommended this album to me…well, ok, that’s not strictly true. He recommended an album by Christian Death and I mis-remembered what he’d said and picked up Bad Religion instead. I’m glad I did, too. I’d never really taken punk seriously prior to hearing Suffer. I liked punk music, but I wasn’t cool enough to really “get” it.  This, though, I was something I could dig my teeth into. I’ll freely admit to having to whip out a dictionary, but c’mon, who uses “obsequious” in a song? BR get a lot of criticism for having clear vocals and tight harmonies (“that ain’t punk!”), but those were the things that appealed to me.  Did this album influence me? You could say that. It turned me into a shameless fanboy. I’ve seen Bad Religion over a dozen times now, and I own (and have read) all of Greg Graffin’s books and solo albums. Suffer opened the door to a bunch of other bands I now love (NOFX, Dance Hall Crashers, et. al.). It’s lean, it’s mean, and it’s nerdy-smart and it’s still my favorite punk album (although Punk In Drublic) comes close.

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. I was raised on 60s musicals and 70s country and western music, which is to say, I wasn’t really that into music until I heard this album. 1970s Nashville-sound country was suffused with big string arrangements, maudlin lyrics, ultra-slick production and maybe a steel guitar or a slight twang that would identify it as “country.”  So, when my dad brought home this album, it was a bit of a shock. It was recorded live, with fiddles instead of strings and production so rough that you could use it as a chainsaw. I’d never heard “country” music with this kind of energy and musicianship. Hell, I’ve never heard it since.  In terms of “made an impact”, this one completely changed my understanding of what music was. This album was (and is) as rebellious as anything this side of Public Enemy (I mean, that’s a high bar). It was the antithesis of what the Nashville establishment wanted country to be and it’s all the better for it.  

Last night I came home to a wunnerful surprise. We were going on a pic-a-nick. Nicole had already packed up all the grilling supplies, so we were ready to head off to the park as soon as I got off the train. We picked Northwest Park here in Austin because it’s a little more forest-y than the other parks with grills and the sunsets are prettier, too.  One of the things I love about Austin as opposed to, say, Dallas, is that the parks get a lot of use. While we were making the fire and prepping the veggies, there were four competing sounds vying for our attention. The PA announcer at the baseball field next to us, the “country and 80s mix” the crossfit instructor was using for a class on a nearby hill, the clacking of the fake swords of honest-to-god LARPers by the tennis courts, and the children laughing on the playground. It was a pretty good mix that sounded more “alive” than “dischordant.”  We (I) may have gone a little overboard on the coals, but we were cooking ears of corn, baked beans, a poblano, bacon, and burgers on a small park grill, so we needed a little more width to our heat than normal. This also resulted in a lot more heat than I usually get, so everything cooked relatively quickly and we were eating before sunset. The other activities died down a little so we dined to the sounds of some French cafe jazz on the iPad. Accordions, acoustic guitars with nylon strings, you know the sound, right? Everything came out well and, after packing up, we decided we weren’t quite ready to leave yet. So, we wandered over and caught the last inning of the baseball game, a playoff between the underclassmen at two local high schools.  The game ended and half the people were super excited and the other half weren’t and we decided that was enough for the night and headed back to the car and then home. No photos since we were focusing more on enjoying the night than documenting it. Damned if I know what I’ve done to deserve such a lovely Tuesday evening but all I know is I want to keep doing whatever it is because this is way better than the life I thought I’d be living.  -RK

Have you ever read a book that kept you turning the pages mostly because you wanted to finish it so you could talk and write about it? I stole my own thunder by writing a short review of Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts – A Fiction on Goodreads without realizing that it would cross-post to Facebook. Oops. Here it is, because it’s a good start to what I want to talk about:  Damned if I know. The disturbingly precise use of language, the fact that it’s almost certainly not a fiction in any accepted sense of the word, and recursive nature of the images that collapse into a heap by the end…this is one of those cases where I can recognize brilliance without completely comprehending it. That’s a lot for a book that clocks in at 120 or so pages. I get the sense that I would benefit from reading this book multiple times; there’s a circularity to it that Grant Morrison would admire. That’s all true, but it fails to capture what it’s like to read this truly odd book. When I read Naked Lunch, it didn’t strike me as truly odd as Murnane’s book. It was weird, sure, but it was weird in an messy, disorganized way. Border Districts – A Fiction is on the other end of the spectrum. Take this passage for example: “Today, while I was writing the previous paragraphs, I seemed to arrive at my own explanation for the intimacy between a reading boy and a remembering man on the one hand and on the other hand a female personage brought into being by passages of fiction. (I do not consider the boy and the man fictional characters. I am not writing a work of fiction but a report of seemingly fictional matters.)” There are hundreds more like it, self-referential to a dizzying degree. He refers to previous paragraphs constantly, and images recur in different contexts throughout its entirety. Murnane doesn’t have stylistic tics; he has stylistic spasms. You will probably never see the term “so-called” used so often in a book of any length.  Oh, I guess I should talk about what the book is about, huh? Ostensibly, it’s about a man who moves from the capital to a small town on the border of a neighboring state, and he spends the entire novel describing his memories. What it’s really about is Murnane ruminating over mental images. He considers their origins, their accuracy, their persistence, and how they will overlay one another, so that the mental image of one thing can be the image of something else slightly modified to suit the new thing or idea.  Which is to say, it’s pretty abstract. So, you have a writer who discusses abstractions with incredibly precise language. Try to imagine Bertrand Russell and Cormac McCarthy co-authoring a book in a “things you might see in a small Australian town” and you’re not too far from it. It’s genuinely fascinating, even when it’s not always a sprightly read, and I suspect it’s a better book than I have the ability to appreciate.  -RK

Note: There are linked videos of BattleBots fights in this post. They are all from last season. There are no spoilers for the upcoming season, which will be on the Discovery and Science Channels this starting this May. Some vacations are about visiting friends and family. Others are about going places you’ve never been, taking in the scenery, the food, the feel and the air of a distant city. Still others are just about getting away from everything and taking a break from a routine. This vacation was not about any of those things. This vacation was about watching robots kick the ever-loving crap out of each other. It was about fire, and noise, and saws, and hammers, and mower blades. This vacation was about BattleBots. Warhead vs. Complete Control in what I regard as the greatest fight in the history of all fighting sports. I am biased. Nicole introduced me to BattleBots a year or two ago and I was instantly hooked. It has far more violence than any sport I’ve seen, but no one gets hurt. It rewards tactical thinking, the ability to design, the skill to build, and the quickness of wit to face a foe bent on the destruction of your bot. In a better world, it would be more popular than any other sport. So, when Nicole saw that tickets were on sale for the taping of season 3 (or 6, or 7…BattleBots has a difficult history), it was a no-brainer to grab a pair to the final frickin’ show. This was one of those items you don’t realize is on your bucket list until the opportunity presents itself. Hypershock vs. Warrior Clan. Please marvel at Hypershock’s non-traditional choice of weapons. We looked at the timing and the finances and decided that, rather than make a vacation out of it, we would make this trip a short one and focus on the single event rather than trying to “see L.A.” We flew in Saturday evening and we’re on our way home on right now (“right now” being 8:00 AM Monday morning; I’ll be posting this later as the idea of buying in-flight Wi-Fi by the hour does not appeal). The upshot is that we have very little to report from a tourist standpoint as we spent most of our time near our hotel (near LAX and Inglewood) and in the part of Long Beach that doesn’t show up in the brochures (unless those brochures are for things like “shipping containers” and “small commercial airports”). Mostly, we saw a lot of the 405, which looks a good deal like other freeways. Chomp vs. Captain Shrederator. The Captain’s builder expressed disdain for Chomp prior to this fight, calling the bot “over-engineered.”  Food-wise, we decided to try a well-reviewed Mexican joint within walking distance of the hotel called Casa Gamino. If you’re from Texas, I would advise you to avoid this. The food was plentiful, but bland does not begin to describe. Wait, that’s not true. “Bland” is a exceedingly accurate description of the chiles rellenos and red chile plate. Lunch the next day was more successful but not without a little difficulty. We tried a place called Panang Thai, literally next to the hotel, which shares a building with a Thai massage place and an aquarium. The food wasn’t spicy, but it was flavorful, well-prepared, and plentiful to a fault. The appetizers were entire meals on their own, and, due to what I hope was a language problem, I was served a bowl of chicken curry instead of the Thai fried rice with chicken I’d ordered. Or, we thought it was “instead of,” as ten minutes later, it turned into “in addition to” a plate of beef fried rice. Then, it was time for the main event: BattleBots! We drove to a hanger in Long Beach and, through some unlikely bit of luck, found ourselves in the front of the line for the group filling one side of the arena. I got some serious chills when we walked in and saw the set for the first time. We picked out an optimal spot and then we waited. Minotaur vs. Warhead in a battle of two of the most outrageous powerful weapons in the tournament. If you’ve ever been to this sort of an event, you already know that there’s a good deal of waiting involved. Carting the bots into the arena, cleaning up after a particularly vicious fight, getting the announcers and the judges into places, doing alternate takes (of which there were surprisingly few; the entire crew were pros at this), but it was all worth it. I’m afraid I can’t discuss the content of the battles until after these episodes air, but I can tell you this: It was worth it. Television does a great job of capturing the violence of these fights, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The sounds inside the building are much louder than they seem on TV, and when something unexpected and incredible happens, everyone in the building laughs and screams even the old pros seem to be delighted by the spectacle. There was one moment in particular; you’ll know it when you see it, that had everyone from the stage crew to the other teams to the on-screen talent lining up to take photos. After a generous number of undercard fights, we finally got to the final. Obviously, I can’t say anything specific, but what I can say is that you’ll want to see it. Last year’s final, a battle between Tombstone and Bombshell, was a bit of a dud and was over quickly without much in the way of spectacular action. That is not the case with the final this year. Tombstone won the tournament last year. This is not the final because the final wasn’t very good. Most fights against Tombstone are not very good. Ask Counter Revolution. We had an absolute blast. Would we do it again? Of course! My voice is absolutely shot and we must have sweated off half a dozen pounds over the course of the evening. One of the most fun, ridiculous things we’ve done.  But who won? Looks like it was me! -RK