The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 9

Japan
Adolescent Sex

We're back in Nina Simone territory again--you aren't supposed to pay attention to Adolescent Sex. No, there's another Japan release from 1978, Obscure Alternatives, and that's the one that you're supposed to get behind. "Who says," you cry. "Tell them to bugger off, UK style, in keeping with the band's actual homeland", you snarl. "Tell me this person's name, so that I might include it in my post-nighttime-prayer mockery", you demand.

David Sylvian, the goddamn lead singer, that's who.

awww, what the fuck does that guy know.

Sylvian, along with his "mates", where only teenagers when Japan signed up with German record label Hansa in the mid 70's. Hansa's incredibly good taste--they put out David Bowie's Low and Heroes as well as Iggy Pop's Idiot and Lust for Life--eventually got them purchased and incorporated into the BMG empire, and during the late 70's, it was obvious why--the label couldn't do anything wrong. Besides Japan, Bowie and Iggy, the label also saw a nice fat paycheck with Boney M, which might have been why they had the money to get behind a bunch of teenagers too young to show anything but future promise. Japan's two 1978 albums didn't perform as well--despite a Wikipedia-rumored success, oddly enough, in Japan (the country)--but they did bring forth a sound that isn't really like anything else you'll find on this countdown. Sure, you'll find disparate strands of it--"The Unconventional" ends with a Goblin style outtro, the melodic layering of vocals and Roxy Music infused twang shows up on After The Heat as well as More Songs About Buildings And Food--but the overall experience of Adolescent Sex is one that's startlingly unique for the time period. There just isn't anything else in the year that can compare.

In 1978, the track of New Wave seems to have been "let's add _____ to a punk aesthetic, and then make it poppy. Also, make-up." In that vein, Japan had it down pat: they primped their hair, they boy-ed up their faces, and they warbled a bit when it came time for high notes. The difference between what they did with Adolescent Sex, as compared to other bands that played at the Lego style of music construction, was that they kept forgetting to add the punk thing back in while recording. Instead, they chased funk guitar sounds with synthesized effects while Steve Jansen--only 19 at the time of recording--started his long trek from youthful drumming talent to the in-demand studio player for just about every strand of music imaginable that he's been for the last two decades. On top of it was David Sylvian's vocals--and while they can arguably be said to have gotten better, there's something to be said for his haunting "I'm probably going to fuck your girlfriend, maybe your dad, just saying" delivery on Adolescent Sex. Mixing his blurts and yowls so it sounds like he's got a tin can between him and the microphone, Sylvian's vocals end up taking on a sound that is at times almost inhuman; it's less singing than it is another instrument bouncing from Mick Karn's pumped up bass guitar that, if you know how to fuck with an EQ, sounds like something that belongs underneath the sauntering feet of Shaft, who I have no fucking problem talking 'bout. Even when the songs start down the direction of being another weird and clueless attempt at British white boys playing Parliament, out comes the effects, and you start to pick up on how genius it was for Method Man to use all that space-rock prog on Tical--even without the instructions to "keep on bouncing", you're already there, and you've blasted off into space, no matter that it's Richard Barbieri's keyboards and not LSD at the controls. Japan knew it too--like Silver Mt. Zion in 2008, none of these songs end remotely when they should, there's clear indication on almost every track why radio hits didn't spring forth. You can't sell anybody on a 10 minute song about how weird it is to watch television, even less so when it's got a good four minutes worth of the individual band members fucking around with their instruments.

Nowadays, Japan is mostly acknowledged as the starting place for a group of talented musicians who apparently didn't get along that well--Steve Jansen's exhaustion of discussing the various stories in last years Wire interview made it clear it's a overly-trod upon subject--but what that story fails to touch upon is what was lost when the band failed to find the global success of 1978's other two big debut albums: The Police & Van Halen. From 1978 onward, it was simple: you either got laid while drunk and listening to Van Halen, or you tried to get laid while crying and listening to the Police. If Japan had hit it just as hard?

Man, shit would totally be like the Jetsons right now.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 10

The Rolling Stones
Some Girls

Exile in Main St. is a high water mark in the history of rock & roll, so it’s no surprise that The Rolling Stones struggled to maintain their creative momentum after its release in 1972. Subsequent albums Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock & Roll had their fans, but, by the time The Stones got working on 1976’s Black and Blue, they were undeniably in some sort of a rut. Essentially, the sessions for Black and Blue were auditions to find a replacement for guitarist Mick Taylor, who had joined the band just prior to the release of Let It Bleed, at the beginning of what many would argue was The Stones’ most fertile period. As a result, the guitar work on the recording of Black and Blue was stretched between Harvey Mandel, Wayne Perkins, and Ronnie Wood, who eventually replaced Taylor in the band. The songs on Black and Blue were designed to allow their prospective guitar players to wank around, but The Stones also adopted a healthy dose of funk and disco sheen for the recordings, with Mick Jagger comparing the band to the Ohio Players in the pages of Rolling Stone. The resulting album has a certain amount of charm, including a cover of early reggae song “Cherry Oh Baby,” and some jazz piano played by Billy Preston. Largely, though, it’s a hot mess. To make matters worse, The Stones felt that the best way to advertise the album was with an enormous billboard on Sunset Boulevard that depicted model Anita Russell in a torn dress, with her arms tied up and her legs tied open, the album cover nestled in between them, and a huge purple bruise on her chin.

The Rolling Stones have always had, let’s say, an interesting relationship with their own unyielding misogyny, ever since “Under My Thumb” compared Mick’s girl to a squirming dog, but the Anita Russell advertisement took it to a whole new blatant level, and it played no small part in their declining popularity. Of course, there were plenty of other factors contributing to The Stones’ lack of record sales and dismissal by critics that marked the time. This period from 1972 to 1977 created a lot of the negative associations that hang with The Rolling Stones today—that they were a group of drug addicts, that their best music was far behind them, that they were bigots, that they were millionaires completely out of touch with the working class blues they attempted to play, that they were dinosaurs, relics that had no place in the scene now that punk had come along and made them irrelevant. It was under these circumstances that The Rolling Stones began work on their last truly classic album, Some Girls.

Without ever tipping over into self-awareness, Some Girls wraps up all of the personal and musical turmoil surrounding The Stones in the late seventies, and shoulders it in one defiant, cohesive statement of purpose. Thought the funk, jazz and reggae explorations on Black and Blue were mildly embarrassing? Here’s “Miss You,” a song that could stand alongside the best rock songs of the decade, while still being able to get asses shaking on the dance floor—enough so that the band even released an extended version for the discos. Think Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are too strung out to play? Worried that Ron Wood isn’t fit to clean up Richards’ vomit, to say nothing of filling Mick Taylor’s spot in the band? Here’s some of the most dynamic and diverse music in The Stones’ catalogue. Think they’re incapable of producing more than one hit per album anymore? How about four charting singles in the U.S. and U.K.? Think the band is misogynist? They’re even more misogynist than you think! Think that Mick Jagger is gay? He’ll drop “When the Whip Comes Down” just to fuck with you. “Shattered” features a vocal performance that could almost be considered rap. “Imagination” is such a ballsy reclaiming of The Temptations’ soul that The Stones don’t even bother to use the song’s full title. “Beast of Burden” is so emotional, it might just prove that Jagger is not a sociopath.

The Rolling Stones’ work in the sixties, and their ridiculous Let It Bleed/ Sticky Fingers/ Exile On Main St. hot streak made them legends, but Some Girls turned them into a band you could never count out, no matter how much was leveled against them. Rarely has one album refuted so many nay-sayers. As their popularity waned, and a new generation rose up to take their place, The Rolling Stones were supposed to retire and fade into the sunset. Instead, they set themselves up for one of the longest, most financially and musically successful careers in rock. Plenty of bands are at their best when they have something to prove; when The Rolling Stones have something to prove, they rewrite history.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 11

The Cars
The Cars

For better or worse, The Cars’ self-titled debut laid out the blueprint for a decade’s worth of radio-friendly rock & roll. Without it, there would never have been a Huey Lewis & the News, a Greg Kihn Band, a Robert Palmer (who reviewed the album for Rolling Stone upon its release), or a Duran Duran—and while those names might not immediately set your toes a-tappin’, it’s difficult to overstate how omnipresent their sound was in the early 80’s, until Guns n’ Roses came along and flipped the script. What’s fascinating about The Cars is how disparate the styles are that the band attempts to weave together—taking cues from psychedelia, bar rock, punk, new wave, Roxy Music-style glam, and proto-punk along the lines of The Modern Lovers (whose Dave Robinson was their drummer), among other things—and how fully formed the band sounds upon arrival, two traits that almost none of their successors shared.

The Cars begins with three stone classics. “Good Times Roll,” while dressed up as a party-starter, is something other than what it pretends to be. Rick Ocasek sings “Let the good times roll” as if he’s been forcibly strapped into an easy chair, made to eat cake until he vomits as the party goes on around him. Synthesizers blast and guitars scrape and scramble, while an army of back-up singers harmonize in the same slightly-icky monotone. The whole thing ambles along in a decidedly un-raging mid-tempo strut. Ocasek’s lyrics almost immediately begin mocking the party: “Let the good times roll/ Let them make you a clown/ Let them leave you up in the air/ Let them brush your rock & roll hair.” The whole thing is, well, totally weird—but the song has been so absorbed into mainstream culture, nobody notices. The Cars might be one of the most subversive bands ever.

“My Best Friend’s Girl” opens with the kind of surgical bass riff that would make Wire or The Strokes wet themselves. Rick Ocasek somehow turns Jonathan Richman’s stuffy-nosed, half-ironic, speak-singing technique into something that could rock a stadium, aided by call-and-response vocals and hand-claps (side note: a man who doesn’t love hand-claps is a sad, lonely man). Elliott Easton makes a case for himself as one of the most underrated guitar players in rock by shoehorning a rockabilly solo into the mix. Then, “Just What I Needed” is all like, “uh-uh,” and tops it. The opening bass notes are more staccato, and punctuated with full-on guitar kerrangs. Bassist Benjamin Orr takes over the vocals and turns a performance even more distant, more sullen, and, somehow, more anthemic; Easton’s guitar work is even cooler.

None of the other songs reach the same iconic stature as the first three, but they’re just as substantial. “I’m In Touch With Your World” is a deconstructed ballad, built on throwaway percussion and keyboard noises. “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” begins defiant and turns pleading, while personal favorite “Bye Bye Love” crams an epic amount of feeling into its three-word chorus. And, of course, “Moving In Stereo” later took on a whole new life as the song that soundtracks Brad Hamilton watching Linda Barrett removing her bikini in his imagination in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yet, “Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Just What I Needed” are classics because they follow the blueprint of early rock & roll—essentially, they’re songs for teenagers. The difference being that this was a post-Watergate, disaffected generation of teenagers, and The Cars fittingly tricked out their songs with irony, distance and a healthy amount of cool in order to reach them. Fine, yes, we’ll party all the time, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be happy about it.

-Martin Brown, 2009

Television Of The Weak: Making, Breathing, Showing, Punching. And Killing.

This week, we've got the season finales of Dollhouse and The Celebrity Apprentice, the first installment in the BBC's Wallander series, and your regular doses of 24, The Mighty Boosh, Lost & Fringe.

24: "5:00AM-6:00AM" by Tucker Stone

Did you catch it? The inside joke. The one about Kim and her 2009 version of cougar problems. Yeah, it wasn't very funny. It was nice to see the coporate bad guy from The Shield show up as Kim's doomed protector, in a subtle tweak on the old "hire a warhorse character actor to trick the audience into being surprised when he's slaughtered in a bathroom", but they blew the trick a bit when they brought in Don McManus as the neck-snapper, who you might remember from Magnolia, The Shawshank Redemption or any of the eighty television shows he's appeared in over the last twenty years. In the battle of "hey, that guy", a friend of Paul Thomas Anderson is always going to be more important to the plot then a grown-up Alex Diaz from 90210. Either way, McManus is a definite step-up in the role of "somebody who will eventually die for the crime of threatening Elisha Cuthbert in an attempt to get Jack Bauer to do something."

I have to pull back the curtain for a second here: I really wasn't aware that there was a group of people actually worked-up about this whole "Jack has a terminal illness and will die soon" thing. I realize that the prevalence of entertainment news can spoil shows, but even without knowing that Kiefer Sutherland is signed on to star in at least one more series of the show, I just assumed that everybody watching already knew that whole subplot was complete bullshit. This last week, I was surprised to discover that no, that isn't really true, and some people--who I happen to both like and think are relatively intelligent--are pretty freaked about the possibility of Jack heading off to a bioweapon induced death. So--okay, I guess? Here's a random prediction on how this is going to play out, unless 24 plans to work crazy time-jumps into the show: Jack and Kim will die on the operating table while they play out that whole "stem cells fix everything" experiment during the final seconds of the season, there will be a variation on the silent clock, and in January the show will start up again with some kind of "Gotcha" moment. Hopefully, Kim won't be back, and we can really get down to the business of Jack Bauer being a depressive psychopath. (That's assuming that Kiefer doesn't get himself sent back to jail for headbutting the Proenza Schouler guy.)

Anyway, back to basics: we're fully into the final hours now, which means next week's episode is going to be a budget-heavy action festival, and while "5:00AM-6:00AM" wasn't as mundane as last week, I'm chomping at the bit for some smack-tion. Watching Kiefer Sutherland beat the shit out of a handcuffed Carlos Bernard was nice and all, but I doubt anybody was rooting for the final Jack versus Tony showdown to be a minor car wreck happening at 20 miles per hour. "We don't have time for a chase," said Jack. Really? You don't? Not even a little one, for the viewer at home? I'll make time if you want to give me a chase. Other than that, the bioweapon threat was dispensed with in a shot-for-shot remake of Season Three's "throw the bomb in a glass case" moment, with a Hazmat truck taking over for a cafeteria refrigerator. (Unfortunately, nobody got their hand cut off this time.) Olivia Taylor continued to play the whining sleazebag while Glenn Morshower and Leland Orser restrained themselves from saying "You know, you're a really shitty liar," so get ready for another scene where Cherry Jones screeches "What is GOING ON around here, I am the PRESIDENT."

You know what though? Nobody cares. 24 has always had filler sub-plots to serve as breathing room between the snarling. They might have been a little better when Dennis Haybert was around catching baseball bats, but they ain't going anywhere, or getting better, anytime soon. All that matters is how Jack versus Tony will play out. Two hours to go.

Dollhouse: "Omega" by Matthew J. Brady

Thank god for Alan Tudyk; let's get him to star on the show regularly, mmkay? Yeah, that's not going to happen, but he does things right. Last week, he was revealed as the villainous Alpha, a rogue doll who has dozens of personalities sharing space in his head. He plays that craziness to the hilt, flitting between personas from instant to instant, with the help of some skipped-frame editing. It's pretty awesome, especially compared to Eliza Dushku's incompetence when trying to do something similar. Yes, even in what might be the final episode, I can't stop beating that horse. Alpha's scheme involves implanting Echo with a bunch of personalities, hoping she'll join him as a godlike ubermensch and take over the world or something, but she wants none of it. There's probably supposed to be some moral debate going on here, but it mostly boils down to the idea that even with a wiped mind, the dolls retain some of their original character, so this means that Alpha, who we discover was a serial killer in the making, is evil, while Echo is all nice and shit. Simplistic, but it works pretty well. Better still is the moments where Alpha downloads Caroline, Echo's original personality, into a random girl that he kidnapped and forces her to face "herself". That was kinda cool.

In other news, we find out that Dr. Saunders, the Dollhouse physician who got some nasty facial scars when Alpha escaped, is actually another doll who was (permanently?) imprinted with her doctor persona. We get some flashback scenes of her life as a doll, including a nice bit in which she and Alpha play a Mickey-and-Mallory-style pair of psychos (although who knows why somebody would pay for that). Amy Acker isn't nearly as convincing as a blank slate though; that's one area where Eliza Dushku actually outperforms someone. It is kind of neat to see her come to the realization that she's a fake person though, and a scene where she berates poor Victor and calls him useless after Alpha carved up his face is pretty effective.

And we also get a sort of new status quo, with Agent Ballard deciding to work for the Dollhouse for some reason, even though he's highly morally opposed to their very raison d'être. He does bargain to have a doll released, which surprisingly isn't Echo (or not all that surprisingly, really, since they're not going to get rid of the show's nominal star). Instead, it's November, probably because he was guilty about fucking her. He does get a pretty awkward goodbye with her though.

And I guess that's it? Not a bad season-ender, although Alpha just kind of conveniently escaped, able to return and menace people another day. That's going to be the hope for a possible second season: that Alan Tudyk shows up at some point. Let's see more of that craziness and less of Eliza Dushku desperately trying to act her way out of a wet paper bag.

Fringe: "The Road Not Taken" by Matthew J. Brady

This isn't the season finale, but it could be considered part one for next week, since it sets up most everything for whatever the big event is going to be. It is a relatively self-contained affair, but a good portion concerns the meta-plot and it ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. Fun? Well, at least one of the ideas is, with Olivia suddenly having weird visions that don't line up with reality, including seeing two bodies at a spontaneous combustion/pyrokinesis crime scene when there's really only one. As always, Walter guesses what's going on, and gives us a science-fictional lecture while explaining it: she's jumping into parallel universes! You know, the kind that result whenever anybody make a decision, with the other possibility going on to form its own cosmos, like if I forgot to brush my teeth this morning and as a result everybody turned into Nazis. (I'm sorry?) That's of some sort of interest, although it's never explained why this is happening, or why it's happening now. It does help her solve the case though, by finding out the identity of the second body and tracking them down. Also solved: that obnoxious FBI guy who hates Olivia and kept screwing with her earlier in the season. Turns out he's evil (well, more evil), working with the bad guys, but he gets a nice bit of flaming death. And when Olivia confronts Walter about whatever experiments he was up to in the past, he still can't remember the details (because he's crazy, you know), but it was all for a purpose: to prepare for some coming disaster. Ooh, portentous! Walter also gets spirited away by the Uatu-esque bald guy who has shown up previously, so something big is in the offing for next week.

On the debit side of the equation, there's a pretty ridiculous bit of pseudo-science in one scene, even more silly than the usual stuff in this show. We hear details about a secret project Peter is working on, providing some not-very-subtle foreshadowing that he's going to reveal it at a key moment. It turns out that he was building a device to digitize Walter's records (which is pretty fucking overkill; you don't need an electron microscope for that sort of thing, you just need a turntable that you can connect to your computer), which he uses to read the audio that was melted into a pane of glass when a character burst into flame (I would say that it makes sense in the story, but it really doesn't). This involves cutting a circle of glass from the window, taking an image from it, then somehow playing the grooves in the glass to hear what was happening at the time. And for some reason, he has to spin a turntable like a DJ to control the playback. Good god, that makes no sense whatsoever. I blame Akiva Goldsman, who has apparently stuck his fingers deeply into this show; he didn't completely write the episode, but he's credited with "story".

I guess we'll see if anything interesting is going to come of all this next week in the finale. But given the trend of increased stupidity in the show, I don't know if I'll bother sticking around next season. Fuck you, Akiva Goldsman, you ruin everything.

The Celebrity Apprentice: "Season Finale" by Martin Brown

The first season of The Celebrity Apprentice was revelatory; the second was a mess. But this season, which concluded this week with Donald Trump hiring Joan Rivers over Annie Duke, seems to have created more hype than any season of The Apprentice since the first. Mostly, that’s because it did the same things most VH-1 caliber reality TV-shows do—the screaming matches, and the self-parody, and, you know, all the Bad Girls Club shit, just cleaned up a little for NBC and with “celebrities” competing for “charity.” When it comes down to it, Joan Rivers is not a whole lot different from Tykeisha Thomas (AKA “Somethin” from Flava of Love 2), except that she didn’t shit on the floor in the first episode THAT WE KNOW OF. Rivers treated her competitor Duke like absolute garbage, berating her at length, and not allowing her to speak in her own defense—or even wish Rivers good luck—and Trump refused to acknowledge a single bit of it. Even his response to Melissa Rivers’ conniption fit in Week 9 was a muted “That wasn’t your best moment.” It’s possible that Trump didn’t know going into the season that he was going to pick Joan as his apprentice, but it’s likely that he knew he might pick Joan as his apprentice, which is more than could be said for 75% of the others—including, apparently, Annie. Hence, his absolute unwillingness to say anything remotely negative about or around her. What probably happened was this: Joan picked up on, or already knew about, Trump’s fondness for her, and instigated a fight with the best player in the game, Annie Duke, in order to ensure her spot in the final two (Trump picked the finalists last season based on the fact that he wanted to see Piers Morgan and Trace Atkins face off.) That’s why the inciting incident behind Joan and Melissa and Annie’s feud was a supposed conversation that took place off camera.

I’m harboring no illusions that Annie Duke is anything remotely resembling a good person. It’s pretty easy to pin her right off the bat as a self-obsessed, narcissistic egotist—and, yes, those all mean the same thing, and, yes, Annie Duke is all of them. Damn it, though if she didn’t play the game perfectly. She knew exactly what she had to do to win—raise money, win challenges, bring in celebrities—and she did it 300% better than anyone else on this season. However, while Annie played the game, Joan played the show. By actively breaking the glass ceiling of decorum that usually accompanies these shows and these celebrities trying desperately to enhance their self-images, she created some incredibly compelling television (if not qualitatively good television, which I remember the first season being, though now I might have to rewatch it to see if I was right)—and she was rewarded by Trump and producer Mark Burnett for it, just as they were rewarded by NBC for it. Season 3 airs next Spring.

The Mighty Boosh: "Mutants" by Sean Witzke

"Look at your face - ambient, pure ambient. It's like The Orb's third album."

So this week, "Mutants". This is the second episode of the series, and while it would be nice to see a season run in order, it's kind of pointless now that Adult Swim started off with Boosh season 3. That season, the latest, is definitely the most weird and dark that the show has gotten. It was a strange decision, and I had assumed that Adult Swim had only been able to clear the overseas rights for S1 and S2. But here we are, "Mutants" immediately following "The Chokes". Six episodes in, and suddenly Howard and Vince are much younger. Everyone works at a zoo. Richard Ayoade is completely gone. Howard's crazy after a lady who looks like Sara Palin only w/ a french accent. Vince has terrible hair. Matt Berry is here as the scenery chewing karate-chopping billionaire bad guy. No crimping, and Bollo doesn't talk. It's a good thing that this show has absolutely no continuity episode to episode or season to season. People might get confused.

Stuff that's cut - the Kenan and Kel variety show opening with Howard and Vince giving introductions is out. That's a shame, those are the funniest parts of these early episodes. Bob Fossil dealing with a class of kids, trying to convince them there's an elephant in front of them but it's camouflaged. The credits skit is actually a payoff for a line that's been cut between Vince and the cobra. Relatively little compared to the Argento film that was the American edit of "The Chokes" last week.

This version of the Boosh is a lot more like a children's program, only written and performed whilst fucked up on mushrooms. Howard and Vince work at a zoo, animals talk, and the stories are more adventures than situations. This time, zoo owner Dixon Bainbridge (Matt Fucking Berry) is kidnapping animals and people to create multi-species mutants, supposedly to drive up zoo attendance. Whereas in season 3 it's less Scooby Doo, more standard sitcom, only both formats processed through the Boosh's ramshackle Douglas Adams/Muppet Show aesthetic. It's also a lot less packed with jokes - by the time they got around to "The Party", these guys really knew how to cram in the gags, callbacks, and extended conversations that are in themselves funny on top of the silliness and crazy costumes. Coming off of their radio and live shows - of which I am sorely ignorant - they took some time to figure out the pacing needed for episodic TV. Matt Berry is a fucking force of nature, as one who knows his work cannot deny. Dixon Bainbridge doesn't have much to do here other than be a mad scientist and a dick, he doesn't even have much dialog, and he still owns this episode from start to finish. If anything, the man becomes a star when you see him in full surgical scrubs holding a beaker full of scotch. The mutants are appropriately hideous and noticeably handmade, which is fantastic. The Mutants song that closes out the episode is one the Boosh's best songs - up there with "Love Games" and "Tundra" for pure children's TV simplicity and pop song catchiness. The problem with S3 is it's the least musical, and the great music in it is mostly crimps. Of course, a full fucking minute is cut of "Mutants" for the US airing, which is just a fucking slap in the face for anyone who'd actually wanted to listen to the songs on this show. But of course, I don't think they give a shit. If they do, they've got a mean way of showing it.

Next week "Bollo". Only it's the first season, so he's not funny, because Dave Brown's not in the gorilla suit until season 2. But we do get to spend a lot of time with Death, who talks like Alan Ford in American Werewolf in London.

Lost: "Follow the Leader" by Zeb L. West

Is Lost Fantasy or Science Fiction? Although any savvy TFO reader already knows the difference, there’s still some people who think they’re just one big lump category involving dragons or space or some shit. So what’s the difference?

The simplest I’ve heard it laid out is in terms of the plausible vs. the impossible. If you show a viewer a dragon, they say ‘okay, that’s impossible’ because conventional wisdom says that fire-breathing serpents don’t exist. But if you show them a space ship moving faster than the speed of light the viewer says ‘okay, that’s plausible.’ Even though they know it’s impossible according to current scientific theories, if they had to go toe to toe with a Trekkie at a SciFi convention, they wouldn’t be able to prove that it might someday not be possible.

So where does that leave Lost? Time Travel, teleportation and even psychic activity are usually dropped in the SciFi category depending on how they are treated. If you time travel by making a wish, teleport by wiggling your nose, or read minds through the use of a mystical crystal, you’re in the realm of fantasy. But if you bend the laws of physics to visit the past, listen in on the thoughts of others through a chemical imbalance in your brain, or teleport by molecular deconstruction and reconstruction, then suddenly we’re in the realm of SciFi!

There’s no doubt that Lost is laying a heavy foundation of pseudo-science involving the Dharma Initiative and a massive magnetic disturbance that sucks down airplanes. But the nagging fact remains that there are also elements of the fantastical everywhere! At this point it seems that Richard Alpert is immortal, Jacob is a ghost that haunts a shack, and that the island has an anthropomorphic will! Although each of these may eventually be given the pseudo-scientific treatment, at current count, Lost has one foot planted in each genre!

Don’t worry faithful reader: although I’ve appreciate you allowing my philosophical indulgence, I won’t forget to speculate on why it even matters if it’s SciFi or Fantasy! It matters because viewers who have been strung along with the promise of plausibility will probably be sorely disappointed if everything is chalked up to the magical. If it’s all a dream, if religious mysticism plays too large a part (i.e. Locke turning out to be Jesus), or if Atlanteans appear to explain everything, then we’re going to have quite an ugly Deus Ex Machina on our hands.

So if you watch the finale in a couple years and feel like it was all a bit too easy, don’t say I didn’t warn you about the red flags.

The major revelations of this week’s episode:

• The quaint little valley where the Dharma Initiative chose to build their suburb is unfortunately placed directly over the hydrogen bomb that Jack, Sayid and Eloise intend to detonate!
• Juliet and Sawyer are just about to happily accept exile to the mainland via the submarine, when their lovey-dovey session is rudely interrupted when old third-wheel Kate plops down between em!
• And my favorite musical theme returns this week as Locke leads an exodus of Others on a march straight to Jacob's cabin, where we get our final and biggest reveal of the episode - that Locke is so adamant about seeking out Jacob because he intends to kill him!

Wallandar: "Sidetracked" by Tucker Stone

While this isn't the first time that Henning Mankell's Swedish detective character has appeared onscreen, the series of TV movies that began this past Sunday are the first time that the character has been featured in an English language adaptation. The books, of which there are currently eight--not counting a collection of short stories or the spin-off novel centering around Wallander's daughter--are a global success, seeing print in America from the Vintage Crime imprint best known for purchasing the Black Lizard line of books, which is whom the world thanks for the still-in-print Jim Thompson library.

It's about time. The BBC--where this Kenneth Branagh starring series first premiered--and PBS' Masterpiece Mystery series, who are currently airing it in the US, have been churning out detective thrillers for years, and they had to get around to Kurt Wallander eventually. (Although the Swedes themselves released television films of the eight novels, a straight to video adaptation of the short story collection, a cinema-released version of the daughter novel as well as a mind-boggling 12 film series based off completely original scripts, few of these had traction in the US.)

Dispensing with any notions of completionism immediately by focusing the first film on the fifth novel, Sidetracked is mostly an opportunity to showcase the talents of Branagh alongside the omnipresent RED digital camera that films the series. Although any adaptation is always going to have to take liberty when it comes time to make the book to film jump, the Wallander series is a particularly difficult case, and in Sidetracked, it unfortunately shows. With the exception of one scene--where a couple of forensic examiners mention some recent instances of children inflicting themselves with harm--none of Mankell's long-running thematic questioning of what sort of community progress has wrought in Wallander's beloved sea-side town of Ystad survives. A brief insult towards Kurt when he mentions where he is from, "Did someone lose a cat?", is the only blatant hint that our protagonist comes from a town with a population numbering less than 20,000. Some of the books most popular characters find their personalities truncated to walk-on status, the most painful of which is the loss of the chief medical examiner's loathsome personality. On screen, no one matters but Kurt, and while that isn't extraordinarily far from the books, the choice to gift his compatriots with little more than utilitarian status is one that leaves the show completely on the back of Branagh, who is on screen for a good 90% of films running time.

He almost pulls it off.

Branagh's unselfish commitment to the part is apparent even in the first scene, wherein he's been called by a local farmer--Henning Mankell in a quiet cameo--to find out why a young girl is sneaking around the man's crops in the middle of the day. Branagh looks like hell. Sleep-deprived, doughy and brutish, he appears as a man confused by everything he comes across, and as he walks into the field--ignoring the farmer's disgust that yet another person is trampling across his livelihood--his face is completely absent of the voracious curiosity seen on televisions other popular detective, Hugh Laurie. It's obvious, before anything goes wrong, that Wallander expects nothing good to come of the visit. Nothing in his life ever does. When the young girl, frantic and terrified, covers herself in gasoline and lights herself on fire as Branagh's face changes from confusion to terror, he's merely proven right. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the innate cynicism to clear himself, and his disgust and loathing for those police that do--the ones who have seen the same bodies as him, and have made the decision to distance themself emotionally from the crimes they live with--is something he makes no attempt to hide. Although the opening of Masterpiece Mystery contains an irritating introduction from the endlessly weird Alan Cumming, there's a bit of truth in the way Wallander is described--he's a man who embraces the guilt for every crime he comes across, who identifies not just with the killer and victim, but the act, the emotional toll, itself. Branagh has it down pat, and as the actual "mystery" of Sidetracked strides through its main plot--a group of men involved in a sex trafficking ring are being slaughtered throughout the small town Wallander calls home--the film never abandons Wallander's obsession and grief over the girl. By the climax, where Branagh is put in the position of choosing to participate in the punishment being wrought on to the men whose actions pushed that girl towards a gruesome suicide, once again with a teenage life in the balance, things couldn't be more clear about who the Wallander character is. His interest in mysteries, in solving puzzles, is an arbitrary skill he wishes he didn't have. He solves these horrible things because it's all he's capable of doing, and he derives nothing but pain in the process. It's an interesting, somewhat cliched, play on the old "Don't take it home with you" maxim. In Kurt's case--both in the books and in Branagh's performance--there's no other option. He comes at solutions through leaps of intellect, but the entire groundwork for those leaps is built on his unwillingness to think or participate in anything else. Sleeping in a chair for scant hours at a time in his cheap, threadbare suits, rarely shaving or feeding himself, paying the scantest bit of attention to his estranged daughter or sickly father, there's nothing about the man that leads one to idolize him. His life, his job, the things he sees--it's all awful. While the films don't look like they're interested in the long-range style of character development Mankell uses for the series--the emotion-heavy scene in Sidetracked where Wallander's demented father expresses support means far less on screen than it did in the novels, where the moment had been built as the conclusion to a five book long subplot regarding his father's contempt and loathing for his son's chosen profession. Leaving in a token "things are getting worse" sequence without embracing Mankell's extensive, David Simon style analysis of the waste that urban progress leaves behind gives the main character an Andy Rooney style whine that doesn't fit. Still, it in some way finds a bit of success to call its own. If that's only because of Kenneth Branagh's performance for now, so be it. There's still more to come.

-Zeb L. West, Sean Witzke, Matthew J. Brady, Martin Brown & Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 12

Bruce Springsteen
Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Coming off the heels of Born To Run, Bruce's breakout album that brought him to a thousand radio stations and millions of new listeners, lost in the savagery of production problems, in-fighting with record labels and "sound in my head", Darkness On the Edge Of Town was recorded with the full band, all at once, sometimes minutes after the songs were written. It's all legend.

Except it's not completely true.

While the talk surrounding the recording process of Darkness lends a veneer of rebellion and iconoclasm to the story, the truth was that the album was recorded over an extended period of time beginning in 1977, and while Bruce was in a sort of "recovery" from the explosive success of Born To Run, Darkness isn't some kind of raw-dog punk album where he smartly put the haters in their place by showing that he there was more to him than barn-burner working man rock--no, that wouldn't happen until Nebraska showed up. It's a fun story though. Darkness, as raw as it can be at times, isn't a slap-dash recording of anger and rage. There's horns on it, for god's sake. The songs were recorded with the full band at once after Bruce wrote them, sure, but that points to an artist who just knew what he was doing in advance, an improvisation in the fabled Jay-Z "freestyle writing" category. The years of war with his former manager put him on the road with Born To Run, and by the time he made it back into the studio for the Darkness sessions, something had changed, and you can tell he knew it too: no longer just a down-home Jersey boy, he'd toured the world, he'd torn down his own promotional posters, he'd seen a poverty and powerlessness that he'd previously only read about. While it would be years before the explicitness of his disgust would become more apparent as fully realized concept, Darkness On the Edge Of Town was his first real shot at it. The album art--a photograph of a surly, wide-eyed kid at home--told a story, sure, one about a cocky, tired kid. But there's an out-take snap from the same session that tells it better, where Bruce can't hold back the image any longer, and what glares into the camera is a skinny, exhausted guy, unsure of what it was he was doing, and unsure of where it was he was going. It wasn't that Bruce was giving up on his love of music, but it would be years before age and maturity would return the type of shameless, grinning joy expressed on the cover of Born To Run's. He didn't plan to abandon his sound to make a Clash album, but that didn't make him any less cantankerou--that's not to say he avoided it though. There's a the petulance to Darkness, with the lyric a  "...a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything" from "Badlands", a fiery condemnation of the world that conceieved, raised and lied to him on "Adam Raised A Cain"--not to mention a full minute intro of a decidedly unfriendly-to-top-40 wailing--even the song that became the main single, "Prove It All Night", speaks of a love between two people who, just to survive, already had to learn what it was "to steal, to cheat, to lie". Personally, I don't believe that Bruce finally made good on the promises hinted at on Darkness At The Edge Of Town until the release of Nebraska. But in 1978? That was enough.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 13

Wire
Chairs Missing

Although the king of the one-two-three-all good music 1978 title obviously belongs to Brian Eno, here we are with his runner-up, an album that he might have ended up on if producer Mike Thorne hadn't acceded to Colin Newman's request to bring in more synthesizers. (When Mike initially refused, Newman apparently said "Then we'll just get that Brian Eno guy". Thorne acquiesced immediately.) Arriving less than a year after Wire had dropped Pink Flag, an abrasive, solid punk album that screeched and howled with what might be considered an against-all-odds "maturity", Chairs Missing is the sort of thing that we're all content to now call post-punk.

Enjoy this moment, it's rare: the plastering of genre label is spot on.

It's tempting to throw a superchunk of credit to Mike Thorne--without his synthesizer and hundred dollar electronics, Chairs Missing could have ended up being just another follow-up throwdown, another punk album. Thing is, Thorne was just following orders, and while those orders included letting him do his thing, they also had some specific checks to make: loops and whistles, bells and clicks. Thankfully, the post-production work is seamless enough that none of Thorne's work reads as paint job, and Chairs Missing stands around looking lopsided when placed alongside what would have been Pink Flag's brothers.

Opening with "Practice Makes Perfect", it's clear that Wire aren't out to create too many hit singles: gloomy, horror movie moans punctuate Colin Newman's yelling of "Waiting for us...waiting, and waiting, and waiting" as the thump of the instruments eventually settles into an unsettling ring that takes over the last 40 seconds of the song's run time. You can't bang your head to this, but if you did, you'd just end up swaying like a metronome. The album follows that arc through "French Film Blurred", and then there's a pretense towards changing it up in "Another the Letter", a 67 second track that sounds like it was created solely to showcase how creepy merry-go-rounds would be if Wire was hired to soundtrack them. Rapidly spitting out vocals until the song stops at the revelation that the "letter" of the title is, in fact, a suicide note--by this point, you're either on board or not. The embrace of a Goblin/Tangerine Dream style of synth takes over for the opening of "Being Sucked In Again", only to be smashed once again by controlled, muted guitars only allowed to spit forth seconds of sound. The whiplash of "Mercy", a song that grinds all of its noise into succinct closers for each measure while the bassist struggles to control the tempo. The 94 second "Outdoor Miner", the closest thing to a single the record label could find on the album, a song they asked the band to expand to single length despite it having lyrics about lizards, leopards and a miner laying down to be buried underground in the "earth which he's known since birth."

"I Am The Fly", the singular breakout song that most people know from the album, an anthemic song that prefigured and probably created the sound--throbbing, industrialized punk gone pop--the band would play throughout the 80's before their most recent--yes, they're still going--return to noisier pastures.

That's the album. It isn't punk.

1978 was a year where a lot of incredibly catchy disco songs were created. A year where you could look to the opening shots from bands that would go on to define the global sound of pop, punk, dub and new wave. But it was also a year where established bands worked to innovate and explore their range of sound. Wire was, to be kind, neither. Pink Flag was their debut album, it had only been on the shelves for seven months when Chairs Missing showed up. While both albums would go on to be considered--rightly so--as some of the most important and strongest of the decade, in August of 1978, Wire was just another punk band doing a follow up. If ever there was a time to rest on laurels and repeat what worked, this was it. Instead, they chased their own demons, argued their producers into bowing to their obsessions, and dispensed with what was catchy in sixty-second tracks. It's a testament to the strength of 1978 that something as gutsy as this album sits this low on the countdown. If the race to the top were judged by courage alone? 

We'd be talking top five material.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 14

Goblin
Patrick

One of three excellent Goblin releases in 1978--the other two being the soundtrack to Zombi and the somewhat unwieldy concept album Il Fantastico Viaggio del Bagarozzo Mark--Patrick was a commissioned piece created for the Italian release of an independent Australian film. More wide-ranging than Zombi in its sound, more focused than Fantastico, Patrick is also the most playful of any of the instrumental albums on this list. (Well, at least one of us thinks that.) Considering that 1978 was a year thoroughly entrenched within the superstar film composition era of John Williams, who had followed Jaws with the one-two-three punches of Star Wars, Close Encounters & 1978's Superman scores, it's a fetching and altogether delightful experience to be at play with something like Patrick--a film score separated in creation from the film itself, as Patrick already had music. (And rest assured, that existent soundtrack is god awful. Woe to any Australian who saw the film without Goblin's whistles tingling in their ears.) With an eclectic mix of prog-rock and the burgeoning power of the 70's synthesizer, Patrick set itself the simplest of goals: lend an emotional lilt to the creepy horror story of a coma patient as he falls in homicidal love with his attending nurse, accent the fear in a film without the budget for over-the-top stunt effects, make strange that which is funny. (And by "funny", we mean the acting in Patrick, which is about as bad as any other late 70's/early 80's low budget genre flick.) Whereas the Zombi soundtrack can, at times, overpower a bit of the film--Goblin's insanely catchy nightly tunes for the television news in that film is one of those tracks far more interesting than what's on screen--the Patrick score works to add a not-on-paper dimensionality that the film wouldn't have achieved on its own. It's not a simple "music made movie better" thing, Patrick may have some terrible acting, but it is an effective horror flick, the music doesn't change that--it's that Goblin made something that can stand completely on its own, a narrative on its own feet. Considering how brief their candle burned in the late 70's, with the revolving door of membership spinning almost as quickly as their soundtracks were being released, it's remarkable that Patrick came into existence at all. But it did, and it remains one of the most effective examples of the sound that Goblin, for too brief a time, had down to a science.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Virgin Read: You Need More Janet Jackson In Your Life, Power Girl

Power Girl # 1
Written by Jimmy Palmiotti
Art by Amanda Connors
Published by DC Comics

Power Girl!  I chose it because I really wanted to check out that Supergirl comic, and I had this confused with that. I'd heard about Supergirl in the Eighth Grade at this DC Panel I attended at the Baltimore ComicCon last year; thought it sounded cute, promptly forgot about it until I saw this title. For a couple of seconds, that's what I thought Power Girl was.  Until I saw the size of her breasts. Those are not the boobs of an eighth grader, unless the eighth grader is being played by some unknown Kardashian.

Anyhow, I was still pleased as punch to have a female super-hero choice to read about, especially one I've never heard of before. Pretty happy cover too, I think I had a Bicentennial record player that looked like that.

I enjoyed this comic. It's a first issue, so it was mostly laying the back story alongside groundwork for more, but I thought it did it in a relatively interesting way. Like the newest Star Trek movie, this issue starts in the action, and I always like that. Manhattan is being devastated by some sort of psychological attack, Power Girl roams around doing super-hero stuff while talking through her origin, it made sense to me--maybe I'm lowering my standards, but hey, I got this, it made sense. 

There was one thing I really loved, low standards or no: she's a superhero, but they didn't make her ridiculously over-talented. What I'm talking about is the fact that she heads up StarWare Labs, but she makes it clear that she's not a scientist and that a lot of the technical stuff at the company goes over her head. I like that. She's clearly smart, but they didn't make her into a genius scientist by day, superhero by night, with the body of a Playmate of the Year. They just made her a relatively smart girl by day who happens to be a superhero by night, with the body of Playmate of the Year. Hee hee.  

So, of course, let's talk about it. It's not why I picked it, but I'm guessing that's what everybody wants, because I don't have a penis, I cry and have feelings, so yeah: let's talk about the body. She's more covered up than some of the other costumed ladies in the land of DC and Marvel I've seen. But yep, there they are, popping and showing, know what I'm saying? Am I offended?

I had a little more time than I usually do to think about this one. I ended up having an interesting conversation with myself, a surprising one that neither I nor the nervous lady next to me on the train expected. I was gearing up to make fun of the ridiculousness of the size of her rack--I mean, that's what you do with her, I'm guessing. I didn't know who she was until I saw the cover, but I'm thinking that's the case.

And then I started thinking about whether I really cared that much. I thought, "you know, for all the complaining I do about targeting new readers and/or knowing your demographic, in this case, they probably are doing a pretty good job of targeting the audience I saw in Baltimore."  I mean, get real. These kind of comic books are generally read by men. It's just a fact. And here's a new series? With a chick in the lead? "How, oh how, dear marketing team, can we appeal to our usual demographic while also courting the female readership?" Tits, my friends. Big tits.

A long time ago, maybe even during one of the first of these Virgin Reads, I launched into a whole spiel about how I used to operate under some assumption (and I think a lot of women did/do, as well) that if men would just become more like women, if we can just get them to be more understanding, or express their feelings more, blah blah blah, they'll be "better." Immature on my part? Probably. But that's the way I used to think about it until I came to the realization that somewhere along the path of my own life I started liking men exactly the way they are. As soon as I did that, everything changed. I can't remember at all why one of the comics I had read brought that up, and why I felt the need to write about what was a personal experience having nothing to do with comics, but I did. I like and accept men just they way they are.

Anyway, I had that realization, and then I fell in love with a guy who loves comic books, and I started doing these things a little while later. And you know what? I pretty much think of comics the same way I do men, although comics are far less interesting. (Meaning, I accept comic books and all there little fuck-ups just the way they are.) I do this whole column just to see how a comic book appeals to me and my "I don't really care either way" demographic. But I try not to get all parental and start talking about how comic books should stop what they've been doing all along and "change their ways" simply so I'll like them more. It wouldn't be a very good idea--if you've ever read these little columns on a regular basis, you already know that I can barely remember which comics I liked, and that except for Nana, I haven't ever even tried to keep up. They could change and I wouldn't even know. So, if scantily clad super females appeal to the people who actually do care, who buy them, why change it?

The thing is, I know that people are going to complain about these kind of drawings. And that's what this is all about tonight. That I'm aware that people might see this comic and people might have a problem with the way Power Girl is drawn. And for some reason, that makes me feel, well, defensive. It makes me feel like I have to be on the other side of the argument--and really, I don't care if they don't draw it differently. I'm not on the other side, because this doesn't mean anything to me. This isn't inspirational, the way this super-hero acts, so why should I get upset about how she looks? She's a cartoon character doing cartoon things. Is she sexy in a fancy sort of way? I guess. But even if she wasn't, that doesn't change my general feeling, which is that I can't see what fixing her costume, or changing the way she looks, is going to do about the fact that she's just another super-hero in another super-hero comic. There's nothing in here that's "moving" or "heroic". It's just a story about a super-hero, an action story, I've read a bunch of those, and if it wasn't for her boobs, I don't know that I'd remember this one being different from the other ones just like it. I can't even really tell you what her powers are. The first page mentions Krypton, and I know that's where Superman is from. She flies a little bit. She seems pretty strong. But she also seems really messed up by the Ultra-Humanites mind-rays, and she gets knocked around a few times. Even her name seems kind of silly, although maybe that's just because I'm used to names like "Superman" and "Spider-Man". Still: Power Girl? Did she pick that? I mean, if it wasn't for her boobs, I don't have much to say about this comic.

I guess I just don't see what is being oppressed here. Is there some strong feminine story that could be told if this character didn't have large breasts? What is it I'm missing?

I kind of wish they'd just go with it and be funny. The cover, the way Power Girl talks, the cut-out in her outfit--why can't she just be silly? She looks silly. She has a silly name. The bad guy in the comic is a giant monkey. So why can't she keep gadgets in her boobs? Why can't she be packing?

I don't know what else to say. Go on, Power Girl. I think you had a good starting point. If this was a Superman comic, I bet he would have stopped a jet plane with his hands or something like that. But it isn't, and that's fine. Go fly your Power Girl boobies around the world fighting evil. Who are you hurting anyway? No one. Go get the Ultra-Humanite. You know it's not really going to save Manhattan if you let him take over your body....he's only going to then destroy it and the world. Fight him! Stop him! I can't wait to find out what tricks you've got hidden up your sleeve (or in your cleavage).

-Nina Stone, 2009