Burn You Up, Burn You Down

I've been listening to the new Peter Gabriel Hit collection -- and to say it's one of the better hits compilation albums out there would be an understatement, aside from the noticeable omission of music from Passion, almost all the hits are here (sadly, it's lacking "Mercy Street", "Intruder", "Secret World", and "I Have the Touch", but he still crammed as much as he could onto these two disc).

The highlight, though, has to be the new song, "Burn You Up, Burn You Down", which was sadly pulled at the last minute from Up. Listening to it, you can understand why it was pulled, but not for the reason you'd probably think. The song is fucking great, a great upbeat rhythm piece more akin to Gabriel's "pop" hits than the measured introspection that was found on Up. It's even downright funky. Although it wouldn't have fit there, here it's gold amongst the other great tracks, relieving that we get to hear this rather than have it buried in his vault of unreleased material.

"Lovetown" is also on the second disc, if you didn't happen to have the Philadelphia soundtrack.

A Voice in the Wilderness

The comments blurb bit should now be fixed. Previously, occasionally when you clicked on the "comments" link or even when opening the individual archives, the page would apparently be blank. I'm not exactly sure what the problem with the script was, but deleting the "remember me?" code seemed to do the trick for the individual archives pages, and placing the comments field within the

tag seemed to do it for the comments pop-ups.

Signal to Noise

When you think about it, in the context of an infinitely possible universe, with the possible existence of any manner of sentient life across it, we're all relatively insignificant. What does one voice matter in the cacophony of thousands, of millions? In this universe, hell, just on this planet, there are several billion other people with thoughts, hopes, dreams, and so on and so forth that might be like yours, might be completely different, might have thoughts significantly more profound, more intelligent, more eloquent than yours. So, what's the point? In this world of ants marching, with someone who's going to be better, faster, more efficient, more intelligent, more insightful than you, what the fuck are you still doing here? You're nothing, just another insignificant speck on a tiny blue marble in a vast black sea.

Kind of harsh, don't you think? If the world really were like that, that one voice didn't matter, you may as well just consign yourself to oblivion right now. I mean, you don't matter, you shouldn't be heard, we need the fucking space for another Starbucks.

I give in to too much drama, granted, but this is essentially the argument held by one Matt Brady, of Newsarama fame -- a site devoted to the egregious amount of comics "journalism" which usually amounts to so much regurgitated press release pap, in case you didn't know what it was or what I thought of it --, as he said on the Brian Wood Forum:

That should be a question in the EULA agreement on EVERY blog host:

"Do you really, honestly - and we mean honestly, not that 'honestly' you use when you ask yourself whether or not you look good in that pair of jeans - think anyone gives a shit about what you think?"

If they did that, and people were 100% honest, there would be no "blog culutre."

His argument is largely levelled at the "blogs", which for some reason or another seems to have raised his ire. Mayhap because we don't kowtow to his bandwagon, or -- in context of the thread itself -- don't all bow down and worship in the house of the pimp or some other febrile nonsense. ...and, of course, anyone who doesn't agree with you should be silenced. What a fair and balanced outlook from a surprisingly conservative media standpoint. (Everyone rush out and buy some more Marvel and DC shit right now so Matt can go to bed happy, thinking he's done a good job being a shill "journalist") ...but I get away from myself.

The key point, the one where this becomes a reductio ad absurdum argument -- despite the obvious self-defeating qualities of the 'who gives a shit?' question in the first place, with a reflexive view back on the query -- is that in the world painted above, in the world where one voice doesn't matter, there would be a silence. There would be no art, no literature, no joy of creativity. Quiet little sheep. Head down. Go to sleep. No one cares what you think.

Endless fields of white, an existentialist's dream. Yet, if no voice mattered, and we were all essentially "shamed" into silence, there'd be no thought of those blank pages, because the necessity for the pages themselves ceases to exist. Electronic bandwidth ceases to exist. Communication becomes perfunctory, utilitarian, and sterile.

The counterargument is simple: every thought matters. Every voice. Every single ounce of any idea. Good or bad. Maybe it doesn't matter to me, maybe it doesn't matter to you, but it certainly matters to someone, even if just for the cathartic release of getting something out of your head. Basically, in some way, fashion, or form, the blog entries -- even if on endless trivialities of what you ate for breakfast or that neat thing your kitten can do with a bowl of milk -- it matters to the person posting it. Possibly a lot, possibly just as a passing notion, but it matters. It's communication. It's information. Without it, human beings, as social animals, cease being human beings and become some other. Some form of automata.

The trick is finding those similar souls, talking about things that matter to you.

Colour Me Amazed

The importing of the original Don't You Hate Pants? postings actually worked. This, of course, means that all links made previously to the blog will have been destroyed, but well...um, "my cat's breath smells like cat food."

A Distant Sound of Thunder

Just a reminder to those of you slavering for the release of the next in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series that the fifth book, Wolves of the Calla, comes out today. Or at least, I bloody well hope it does. Unlike many other high profile, highly anticipated works (like say, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which we had for like a month before we could sell it), we haven't received our shipment yet. This is especially odd considering that the release date of November 4th has been advertised all over the place. Hopefully, ours is going to be in nice and early this morning.

For those of you interested in the specifics, this is going to be a thick fucker, weighing in at over 700 pages, for $52 Canadian ($35 US). ...and, if you haven't already clued in, unlike the other four in the series, this one is being released to the public as a hardcover original (co-published by Donald Grant and Simon & Schuster). The other four were all trade paperback originals, with a non-trade hardcover offered exlusively through Donald Grant. For comics fans, you should also note that this one's being illustrated by Bernie Wrightson.

Simplicity of Style

I've always stated that I wanted d-generation.ca to be simple, clean, and efficient. As many of you will remember, the initial design for the opening page was white with my "mission statement", followed by a simple navigation bar to the various areas of the site. In the last update, I streamlined that even further, through collapsing everything into the multi-purpose weblog, Don't You Hate Pants?

Personally, although I like each thing ordered in its own kind, -- "everything in its right place" and all that, it's the metaphysicist in me that earned a philosophy degree -- I always felt that having everything scattered about here and there was unnecessary clutter, and not the easiest to navigate. That's the intial reason why I switched to a one-stop blog. Yet, to me "everything in the same place" didn't quite work either, so I branched out and decided to embrace this Movable Type method of blogging.

The appeal, largely, of Movable Type was the categorisation it allows. Now, you can look up anything under the category of "comics" and be awed at the fact that there's nothing there, but eventually, you'll see everything of its kind with kind. ...and you've still got everything, all at once, on the main page.

Of course, there are compromises to be made with such "improvements". Namely, nothing is simple any more. It may look simple on your end, but the architecture housing this puppy is bloated and overcomplicated -- and that's after I pared down the useless bits I'd never touch.

Anyway, welcome to the new blog, same as the old blog. I'll still be tweaking things in the coming days, so expect some more changes.

in which d. emerson eddy loses what little sanity he has left

I'm fiddling around with Movable Type, and it's driving me batty. If all goes according to plan, Don't You Hate Pants? will soon get a new friendlier looking interface, provided, of course, I can manage to teach myself the new scripties for the template and whatnot. If not, you may hear about a frothing madman rampaging through Southern Ontario killing people who admit they know CSS and Perl sometime later in the week.

"The Room is on Fire as She's Fixing Her Hair

Like several thousand other white boys across North America, I picked up the latest Strokes album this week, after being thoroughly dejected and disappointed after finding out that the limited edition two-disc set of REM's "Best of..." release had been delayed a week. No REM fix for me for awhile, it would seem. I had planned on picking up the Strokes' Room on Fire anyway, but I was going to wait for a couple weeks until after I got my high fidelity jones out of the way first.

Now, after hearing the first single, "12:51", I was partially expecting something different. I knew that originally the Strokes had set out with this album being produced by Radiohead-producer, Nigel Goodrich, and despite that process being aborted, I was expecting something along the lines of the disparaty between Radiohead's Pablo Honey and The Bends. Instead of something different, we essentially get Is This It 2. Keep in mind, this isn't a bad thing.

This offering is a little more refined than the earlier disc, there's a larger "album" feel here than the last disc, but the overall sound and approach is still the same. The influences are still easy as hell to spot, with a blend of 60's and 70's rock with New Wave, so you'll see snippets of Hüsker Dü mixed with Iggy and the Stooges, some Peter Gabriel-era Genesis accompanied by the Cars clang. I suppose some people could make a game of it, deconstructing each song into their component parts of what strum came from which classic rock guitarist. I'd rather just listen to it at this point.

If I have any complaint at all, it's that -- due to the fact that the band focusses on getting to the heart of the song without any frills or extravagencies -- like Is This It, the album is too damn short, clocking in at just over half an hour.