INKSTAND

This gum is made in Australia and comes in little boxes of about twenty pieces. A box costs less than two bucks, but i forget exactly how much. It tastes like licorice when you first chew it but the flavor quickly makes the transition to pepperminty-gum flavor. I like the narrow little box. It’s unobtrusive, stays intact, holds the gum, and is not made of metal like a lot of mint/candy packaging these days. I’m no Violet Beauregard, gum is usually just gum to me, and I won’t go out of my way to get this gum, but I do preffer it to, say, Eclipse or Orbit in an oh-so-subtle way.

Yesterday my boss gave me a half rack of Old Milwaukee because it was the last one and we are no longer going to sell it. We never really did, actually. I’m not sure why it was in the store. It was “my friday”, as we say, so I had planned on drinking a bunch of it. I had never had it before, knew it was going to be bad, but also knew I had had worse. I’m no snob.
I opened one when I got home from work and about an hour later I realized that I wasn’t even half finished with it. It was still cold, but sipping it left a horrid after taste. It’s really, really gross. Not Steel Reserve gross, but this video shows how I feel about it:

(sorry the quality sucks. my camera is the pathetixxorz.)

I was pretty disappointed when I started reading this issue. The cover shows Jonah Hex shooting at robots. As I flipped through I saw that, not only does he not shoot at robots, he has a team-up with (are you ready?)…Thomas Edison. So I was kinda like “grumble..lame..grumble.” But as I got through the issue it got funnier.
You know the famous Towlie episode of South Park? My favorite part about that episode is the singular-mindedness of the children. All these insane things are happening around them and they only care about their Gamesphere. The thing we hear them say the most is: “We don’t care!” That’s kind of how Jonah Hex reacts to the various plot developments going on in this otherwise boring story.

This guy, Aubrey Booth, hires Hex to retrieve a robot that he says Edison’s men stole from him. As Booth is explaining the significance of progress and how electricity will change the world as we know it, Hex urges him to get to the freaking point! He just wants to know his job and get paid! He hunts Edison down to his hidden city in the Rockies and confers with him. The same thing happens as Edison paints visions of the future and Hex expresses how little he is interested in all of it.

At one point I’m getting really bored with Edison prattling on about progress, then there’s an explosion. Hex seems as relieved as I was, saying “Finally, a sound ah recognize.” Then some men attack the place, we find out Booth was working for Nikola Tesla, Hex shoots them up, the end.

Like I said, lame story, but there was humor as Jonah Hex never broke character.

When I went to pick up my comics from the comic store last week, the proprietor put the first issue of the new Metal Men series in my box, as he’s prone to doing with titles he thinks I might be interested in. I was interested, but declined. He then gave me a free copy of Scalped by DC’s Vertigo imprint. He said that I’d be back to buy the rest. I just finished reading that issue and I’ll say that he was right, in a way.

The story is of a Native American man with nunchucks named Dashiell Bad Horse who comes back to his hometown on the rez after being gone for years. He starts shit with every hood in town then gets hauled to see Boss Red Crow who he knows from way back. He’s the crooked head of everything and he offers Dash a job on his police force because he’s grown up into such a bad-ass. There is the subsequent revealing of people he knows from his past and by the end of the first issue, we see that Dash is not all he seems.

The plot has a Grand Theft Auto feel to it, with the street-level-thug protagonist who works his way up in organized crime. There are a lot of clichéd, Hollywood moments in just the first issue of this book. Some of the dialogue is poorly paced and feels akward. At times the art is cluttered and it’s difficult to tell what’s going on. There is a scene that covers several pages that takes place in Boss Red Crow’s office. On the second page we see a man lying on the ground that Red Crow has scalped. It’s not said who the man is or why he’s there.

Despite all these criticisms, Scalped did keep me interested enough o want to read more. Maybe it was because they set so much up in the story that if this an ongoing monthy series like I think it is, there’s a big possibility the story could stray far from it’s less-than-original starting point.

But am I going to go back and buy more? Nope. I know the momentum that Vertigo currently has, and I know that several issues of this title will be reprinted in a trade paperback. I’ll just wait for that to come around.

These cookies are yummy. They are made of the same basic elements as Pocky and Yan Yan, that is a bready-cookie substance and a creamy flavored dip like chocolate or, in this case, strawberry. The difference between Hello Panda cookies and the aforementioned dipped-sticks is that the cookies are small, round, and have the yummy frosting in the middle. They also have cartoons of pandas playing sports on them.

I like all of these japanese snacks. They are sweet, light, and not very filling. Great for a snack. This box was only $1.09 and I’m pretty sure the Yan Yan (my real favorite) is that much or less, plus with the Yan Yan you get to dip your sticks inthe frosting yourself.

You know how as time goes by, you like things you used to not like, or you dislike things you used to enjoy? For instance, I used to not like asparagus but now I love the stuff. I used to not like almonds. When I was a kid The Brady Bunch came on right after He-Man and I used to despise it. By high school it had become my favorite show ever. What’s my point?..oh, yeah…

When Daft Punk released Homework, I made fun of them. A lot. Why, I’m not sure. Was it because Alex Bennet, the current morning DJ on Live 105.3 FM blasted them after they played in the studio because they just spun records the whole time? No, even then, knowing nothing of electronic music, I knew the difference between a band and…whatever you call Daft Punk. I think at the time I was getting into indie rock and home-recordings, so the idea of an overproduced DJ album just did not appeal to me. “Da Funk” was getting a lot of air play at the time and it seemed too repetitive. Of course at the time dancing was a completely foreign concept to me so having a catchy riff over a fat beat over and over made little or no sense to me. Add to that the fact that I only ever heard that song and “Around the World”, mostly on MTV’s Amp, which I did try to watch once or twice, and you can see why I wasn’t a big fan. Why did I make fun of them with my friends, though? Probably because I was an angsty teen with a chip on his shoulder who felt that the world owed him something and would therefore find anything to “hate”.

When “Discovery” came out, I saw the video for “One More Time” and actually thought the song catchy. The video was fun, too. Then I heard that they were going to make an anime video for every song on the album. I thought that was a cool concept, but when I heard that Daft Punk were robots, no, they insisted they were really robots, I thought “lame”. I never saw any of those other videos and forgot all about them. Fast forward to 2007.

Jeremy told me Daft Punk is coming and he is going. I don’t remember if this is before or after he told me that they did make a DVD of all the songs for “Discovery” and sent me to youtube to watch some. I was kind of digging on it. See, throughout my entire working life I have, save for that one year at the gas station, been subjected to Muzak and that, of course, means a healthy dose of disco music. Boogie Nights, I will Survive, Knock on Wood, and tons more. A veritable Time-Life collection of the stuff. I developed a fondness for a lot of it so when I started dating a guy who’s Bic was flicked by dance and electronic music I wasn’t surprised that I was turned on to some of it (Not a lot of it, mind you, but some of it).
So they were coming, it was a big deal, and I wanted to go. I was partly excited, partly scared both because I didn’t know what to expect. And I was also afraid I’d have to dance but not be in the mood. Ok, enough back story, let’s get to the concert. Or performance. Or set. Or whatever the hell Daft Punk would call it.

The first thing I noticed when we went in was just how massive it was. The show was at the WaMU Theater and I have NEVER been to any musical performance this big, ever. I don’t do arena shows. In fact I hardly do shows, but whatever. This wasn’t arena-big, but it was big. And sold out. So there were TONS of people there. You know how in the movie “Dazed and Confused” it’s like this big party with all these individual stories going around at once. I could totally see a movie set in this place with stuff happening at the merch booth, in the bathroom, at the beer table, in the audience. It was a little surreal and easy to lose yourself in the crowd. I welcomed it, but it got too crowded on the floor. The show was sold out and if you had any intention of dancing, well…forget it. Like sardines in a can, I tell you. During the show, there was one point where a good 2 feet of space opened up in front of me. I pulled Jeremy into my spot to give him the room if he wanted to try to dance. Naturally, the space closed up really quickly.
Before the show Jeremy, Bill and I puttered around, got a beer, and waited for it to start. Once it did, I was sort of blown away. It was so loud. It was so flashy. The bass was…my hair was vibrating…I could feel it in my chest, in my bowels…I wanted it to just consume me. I have developed a taste for beats and this show certainly delivered. I don’t so much like to dance to the beats as much as I like to stylishly walk to them with headphones on. As a result I ended up standing there, maybe trying to dance, but mostly letting the rhythm and music pound into me like a cannon ball. It’s sort of hard for me to explain, not having heard much of their music. Jeremy said it was really deconstructed. I know what he means because there were only small fragments of the songs I knew…none of them as a whole, from the album that is. The light show was great. See, the two musicians (?) were standing at a pyramid-shaped podium thingy that lit up, plus they had all the lights around them as well and a huge video screen.

I have since purchased a Daft Punk album, Discovery. I chose this one because I had to get the one that had “Face to Face” on it. When I listen to this album I feel a little ignorant for being so closed-minded as a youngster, and so long afterwards as well.

I did a piss-poor job of reviewing the actual concert, but whatever. Jeremy got some video of it, but the poor guy has been busy, has fallen ill, plus he seems to have some hurdles to deal with in the video-editing department. So here’s someone else’s: