Transmetropolitan

Sorry for the long hiatus but celebrations take time. Work also takes time. Life sucks lololol. Whatever.

Anyway, one of the things keeping me alive these days is the brilliant Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. I actually got his name completely confused with Garth Ennis, the master-god who created Preacher, probably my favourite comic of all time, and was talking about the themes in "his" work with regards to Transmetropolitan. Yes, its all a bit WTF but they are very similar.

Preacher was the story of a man who managed to bring God to trial for causing the world to suffer. Transmetropolitan is the story of a Gonzo journalist, Hunter Thompson's kin, no doubt, in the future who works to uncover conspiracies, fuck shit up, beat people and expose Truth. Both are, like comics should be, total wish fulfillment. While Preacher lets a man attack God on equal footing, making it seem that random injustice can be accounted for and revenged, Transmetropolitan lets a man attack the Government on an equal footing, also making it seem that random injustice can be accounted for and revenged. It makes it seem like journalism actually means something.

I know I'd like to believe that.

It also really helps that Spider Jerusalem, the protagonist, is so fucking bad-ass. He seemingly beats up everyone that he doesn't like and never, ever loses. Despite being all drugged up all the time and smoking in every panel, he manages to evade government assassins, kick the president in the crotch, throw cops through windows and STILL the public listens to him. It's a bad-assery that's beyond belief, like Beowulf (in the movie), and it's very, very, action-movie cool.

Anyway, I'm posting up the first volume of Transmetropolitan, the files are in cbr format after you unrar them so you'll need something like CDisplay to read it. I personally use some wierd Chinese thing called 'Comics Viewer' but I takes forever to google, but it's out there and its really awesomely good so cheers if you can find it.

Edit: Found it here. Chinese viewer FTW!


Transmetropolitan Volume 1 (drop.io)

King Of The Internet - Greatest Hits

So ur with ur honey and yur making out wen the phone rigns. U anser it n the vioce is "wut r u doing wit my daughter?" U tell ur girl n she say "my dad is ded". THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

No, actually, I was with my honey and we were talking about those crappy marketing slogans for generations that used to be so popular, 'Baby Boomers', 'gen-x' etc and I was wondering what my generation's term was. A quick search on wikipedia reveals us to be called 'Gen-Y' or 'Millenials', which is completely retarded. I'd always rather think of us as GENERATION TERRORISTS, but I think that's reserved for the post Sept-11 crowd.

There was one time, however, where I was thinking vaguely about what characterized this particular generation and realized that, most of us 20-somethings, we grew up with the internet. The more socially inept of us, which of course means me and my friends, were raised by the internet and when we grew up, became proud citizens of the internet. Our generation should really be called 'WTF' when the Schadenfreude of FAIL becomes so ubiquitous, the world becomes meaningless drivel. Nothing is new, nothing is unique, all is recycled garbage and I am such a fucking cynic. Fuck you, me.

The term 'religious freedom' has no meaning on the internet, because it is, at heart, an anarchist society and most religions serve as nothing more than food for trolls anyway. There are a few contenders for God of The Internet and/or Final Boss of The Internet, though, but there is only one man who has truly united the internet enough to be called... I don't know, they don't really have a special name for him. President of the Internet? King of the Internet? I don't know. But just his name alone makes you never want to give him up, let him down, run around or desert him.

If you don't know who I'm talking about, you obviously haven't read the wiki about Ignace Paderewski, the man who was single-handedly responsible for the rise of Polish music. Yes, people. I'm talking about POLAND.


King Of The Internet - Greatest Hits (drop.io)

Sergei Rachmaninoff/ The Philadephia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy - Piano Concertos 2 & 3

Ooh let's have a music to x to thread, x being a variable. Those are always fun, right? Music to take buses to, Belle & Sebastian... Music to look at trees to, Nick Drake... Music to kill yourself to, Joy Division... ummm Music to have sex to?

One of the bad things about having been on livejournal for so long is that you start to make meta-lists in your head. Whenever there's another stupid meme, the whole of livejournal becomes flooded. And making a list of music to have sex to was one of the popular memes yonks back when. My Bloody Valentine Loveless, ooh yes wailmeout251, I did my ex to that once and it was soooo goood, too bad he's gay now. So the meta-list becomes populated by things drippingly romantic or oozingly sleazy. Also I never really liked Marvin Gaye all that much, you guys. How you MEN can listen to man called GAYE sing "Let's Get it ON" makes me question your heterosexuality.

I mean, what if you don't like your sex romantic or sleazy? What if you like it... strange? My ex used to try and wrest control of the stereo from me everytime we wanted to get it on because I would always insist on putting on June of '44 because I wanted to pretend we were making out on ship in a storm and she would think, this is not romantic, this is your sailor fantasy! Let's put on some Bjork instead. Boooring. Which was the cue for me to blow my load, roll over and fall asleep, of course.

Later on in life, though, I was fortunate enough to meet someone who didn't mind my insistence on playing strange music during 'It' and, as a consequence, the music just went all over the place, from Spiritualized to Glenn Branca to John Coltrane. But the best music to xxx to, from that period of time, was something weird even to me. It was SERGEI RACHMANINOFF'S THIRD PIANO CONCERTO! Or the RACH3 as idiots who hear it through that stupid movie Shine would say it. Oh yes! THE RUSSIAN MOTHERLAND! The best place to do it.

I don't really know why, but the rhythm is perfect if you skip the 2nd movement. It starts off slow but insistent and builds up into a crescendo of RUSSIAN EMOTION, which is really the best kind of emotion and the 3rd movement is just really fast, which, if you're like me, is exactly what you want.

But seriously, why have lame British/American pussy emotion about loveing yohu long tiem babbyyy when you can have TRUE RUSSIAN EMOTION ABOUT DOING IT FOR THE MOTHERLAND?!!

Aaarhgjknsfh. Anyway, I am providing you the version played by Sergei Rachmaninoff (conductor Eugene Ormandy) himself even though I prefer the one played by Vladimir Horowitz (with Fritz Reiner) by far, because people love authenticity and I appear to be missing all my second movements for the other pianists hurr hurr. Also, Rachmaninoff kind of looks like Vladimir Putin, who is totally hawt, and Horowitz looks like a Ferengi from Star Trek, which is totally nawt. I might post up the Horowitz/Reiner and Volodos/Levine versions sans second movements in the days to come though. So, there you have it, the best music to have sex to. Also great music to shoot bears to. Oh and last night I dreamt I was in a Halloween costume in Norway and they said wow, please be a composer for us and I said ALRIGHT LET'S KILL SOME HORNETS. True story.

Oh shit I also included Piano Concerto 2. Which merits a whole other entry altogether. I did not, however, include the rest of the things you see on the CD cover, so har har.


Piano Concertos 2 & 3 (drop.io)

June Of '44 - Engine Takes To Water

1. Have a Safe Trip, Dear
2. June Miller
3. Pale Horse Sailor
4. Mindel
5. I Get My Kicks for You
6. Mooch
7. Take It With a Grain of Salt
8. Sink Is Busted

I've gone by the intarnet name, or 'handle' as they used to call it in the 90's, Pale Horse Sailor for a really long time. 5 years at least? I don't know. It's a total bitch trying to give your email address to people, let me tell you that. Very few people get the 'Pale Horse' reference and even those who do don't understand why 'Sailor' is tacked on after. I thought it would be completely apparent to people that I was Captain Ahab, seriously. I mean was there ever a phrase more perfectly fashioned to describe him?

Well, whatever your opinion is, mine is the opposite. Unfortunately, I did not create this wonderful three-string dangle of words. That honor belongs to the fine, fine people that made one of the best albums about sailing and seas, the highly underrated June of '44.

I really don't know much about them, other than one guy has something to do with the band Rodan and later on some of them (or one of them) became another band called The Shipping News. I also know they came out of the Slint Spiderland era where American hardcore-ish indie-ish bands were starting to discover they could turn the volume up and down and up and down and oh lawdy dynamics?!

Well, as evidenced, I was never a really big fan of Slint. But something about this particular band managed to reel me in like a fish into frying pan. Maybe it was the drums that pulled me in first, the rhythms tighter and more exciting than anything else I was listening to then. Maybe it was the sharp, stacatto guitar riffs, as catchy and punchy as Hit Me Baby One More Time (lawl). Maybe it was the fact that I listened to them during that strange period of time where I just kept re-reading that passage from Moby Dick about biscuit and chowder. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the vocals, not at first anyway, but by the time they started screaming "PORT AND BOWWW, STERN AND STARBOAAAARRD" I was fucking sold, man.

On second thought, I think the rhythms had the most to do with it. I don't know what the drummer's name is, but he's definitely one of my favourite drummers. How, from the very first track even, he manages to emulate a rolling sea so accurately, is completely beyond me. You can literally feel the ship boards shifting under your feet, soaked with water and crumbling, rocking from side to side. All the other parts, the guitar parts, vocal parts etc, bring you the stories and the salt sea air but it's truly the drums that set you on deck, bringing you the motion of the ocean. The aptly titled first track, Have A Safe Trip, Dear, kicks off the album by throwing you out to sail through a terrible thunderstorm punctuated by periods of whirlwind calm.

And the fourth track is Pale Horse Sailor yey so you can all understand my name now. Damn I started this review last night while I was still drunk and I spent the whole day working today so I don't feel like continuing it anymore. Sigh. Exhausted exhausted yahoo! Just download the album, it's really good.



Engine Takes To Water (drop.io)

The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS)

Ok I'm sorry, this isn't music but it still is a thing to download and anyway I plan to include other things in the future, like comics and e-books etc. Also, it is really awesome.

There are some games that you just have to give up a big chunk of your life for, some games that, despite having tons and tons and tons of work to do, you say fuck it all and spend whole days trying to complete and make people dislike you and never want to talk to you again ever but you think noo it's not laziness, look I'm on the ninth fucking level of Pork City, do you know how fucking hard I worked to get to that level?!!!?!?

A lot of RPGs try to be like that but Pokemon Diamond/Pearl actually was like that. Actually all the goddamn Pokemon games were like that. You had to catch them all dammit. You had to have them ALL, even if it meant spending entire Sundays wandering around the stupid grass farming for a good catch. There's something about collecting that appeals to our inner otaku. And if you're big enough a nerd to play Pokemon at 23, you're a big enough nerd to want to CATCH THEM ALL!!

But, let's face it, when you're 23 Pokemon feels as kiddy as Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Even though the gameplay is awesome and the collecting aspect makes you feel like your life is actually worthwhile, you still feel a decade over the age limit. Also the fighting engine sort of sucks. Turn-based RPG fighting just sucks on a console like the DS, no two ways about it.

The World Ends With You addresses these two problems and provides us with solutions so elegant, they might be worthy of Bruce Einsteen. With a quick substitution of what to collect, The World Ends With You drives your in-built consumerism into a frenzy. What you collect are 'pins', which are like little badges that contain different powers or 'psychs'. These can then be exchanged for YEN which you can bring to SHOPS to buy CLOTHES in SHIBUYA. No, seriously. Clothes in Shibuya?!?! Gotta have them all! Especially when your nice Dragon Couture boots with the spazzed out name of ONE MAN, NO EQUALS, can add to your HP, Attack and Defense.

Which brings us to the amazingly beautiful, built-just-for-DS battle system. Oh yyyeeeaahhh! I really can't describe how damn fun the battle system is. Like Spiderman's fighting engine, you get to use the stylus a lot but different 'psychs' need different stylus moves to pull off and since you can pick and choose what pins to wear and the pins have their own levels, you are motivated to switch often to level up your pins, making the gameplay incredibly modular and fresh all the time. And that's not all! You get the option of controlling your in-game partner, who uses the top screen, with the control pad! Your partners don't use pyschs but there's a kind of card system in play that you can use to collect stars to pull off massive sync-ing attacks. It sounds really complicated and, well, it kind of is, but somehow, the makers of the game have managed to make the learning curve really gentle and welcoming. The potential for FUN that this crazy system has, though, is IMMENSE. There's so much room for growth!

That the story smells so much like a bad anime... who cares? The game is set in goddamn Shibuya!! That already makes up for everything bad in the story. And the crummy characters actually start to grow on you after awhile. Then again, humans are creatures of habit, right? I mean any character will grow on you after ten straight hours of playing them. But seriously, MORE THAN TEN STRAIGHT HOURS OF BEING ENTERTAINED!! You don't want that?

Anyway, you need a Nintendo DS to play this game. Also something like the Supercard or R4 to run this ROM. But if you're downloading this, I'm sure you know the hows and whats. I'm not sure if there's a PC emulator for the DS, but if you don't own a DS but own a tablet, it's surely worth googling.


The World Ends With You (drop.io)

Shakti with John McLaughlin LIVE (1975)

Shakti with John McLaughlin - Shakti with John McLaughlin LIVE

1. Joy
2. Lotus Feet
3. What Need Have I For This What Need Have I For That I Am Dancing At The Feet Of My Lord All Is Bliss All Is Bliss

Indian food is amazing. I really don't know what the Indian food is like in America or Europe or other western places but here, in Singapore, it's really, really tasty. And it can be had for so little money! Or a lot of money, if you're so inclined. But really, the rice, yoghurt, vegetables and spiced meat, the thosai, the dhal, the rasam... oh lawdy, I haven't had lunch.

Indian food, however, as in, the food people eat when they go to India, has a curious knack for making the people that I've met violently sick and bringing them closer to the jaws of death than they would care to be. One of my friends, who loves India, considers the chance of DEATH to be a legitimate reason for not visiting it. Not right now. Maybe when he's older and more ready to be snatched from life.

But the best Indian food, should be Indian food, right? And why am I talking about food anyway?

To the uninitiated listener, Indian classical ragas, long droning things based around one scale, can be interminably dull. Especially since they last for hours. Ok, not hours, one hour, maybe half, but still! It's not like Western classical where the structure is all important and the composer actively tries to engage you. It's more a meditative thing that you really have to be in a certain state of mind to appreciate. If not you just fall asleep.

But even though sleep is nice too, the riches and depth of Indian classical music once you get into it, is quite unparalleled, offering a very unique, very special kind of peace of mind and beauty.

So, how do you get into it without sleeping for hours? Well, what I did was, I listened to this album. It's not Indian classical but introduces you to some of the intstruments and the vague form of it. The songs are long but exciting, not meditative, and much easier to get into. There are sparks, flashes of beauty in the tracks, gorgeous melodies that will pull you in and it doesn't take you years to get into, just a couple of weeks, maybe.

In short, this is the Singaporean version of Indian food, which is still very tasty since it is made by actual Indians, some of whom come from India, but is clean enough not to upset your stomach and kill you (or put you to sleep).

Now consume it and godspeed. I'm off to find some Indian food for myself.

Shakti with John McLaughlin - Shakti with John McLaughlin LIVE (mf)

Manic Street Preachers - Know Your Enemy (2004)

Manic Street Preachers - Know Your Enemy

1. Found That Soul
2. Ocean Spray
3. Intravenous Agnostic
4. So Why So Sad
5. Let Robeson Sing
6. The Year Of Purification
7. Wattsville Blues
8. Miss Europa Disco Dancer
9. Dead Martyrs
10. His Last Painting
11. My Guernica
12. The Convalescent
13. Royal Correspondent
14. Epicentre
15. Baby Elian
16. Freedom Of Speech Won't Feed My Children
17. Hidden Track

The Manic Street Preachers are a Welsh band who like to dress up, act intellectual and shout political slogans. Unsurprisingly, they seem a little silly. Also unsurprisingly, they command a huge cult following. They're made up of three people right now. Nicky Wire, James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore. Nicky is the cross-dressing, vacumming, teetollar bassist who writes all the lyrics, James is the singer and lead guitarist and musical genius, Sean is the drummer. Adding to their mystique is the fact that one of their band members who used to cut himself with knives and take pictures of it (Richey James Edwards), disappeared in 1994. Poof! And he never came back.

The year is now 2008 and my Manic Street Preachers tickets just came in the mail yesterday. It seems like I've spent the better part of my youth spraypainting my clothes, buying tiaras, feather boas, leopard skin tights, obsessing over them and acting like a bit of douche but good fucking god was it fun. And now I am old and it's hard to be as excited as I was, today especially, since I'm in one of those Serge Gainsbourg moods where you're old and bitter and drunk and just want to fuck girls.

It actually might be part of the reason that I'm posting Know Your Enemy. A quick Google survey reveals that a huge portion of the people who actually post in forums (as opposed to trolling, like normal internet denizens) think that this is the album when everything started skating downhill for the Manics. It was then that I realized that in the back of my mind, I felt everything after The Holy Bible to be a bit of a footnote. And I was overcome with shame. Was I really one of those cutter Richey fanatics who was depressedlawl and pined for his return? How could I have been so... so... unfair to James, the person who actually wrote all the music and was, possibly, the only talented one in the whole band?

My friend D, however, was being very fair to James when he told me that Know Your Enemy was actually his favourite album. I jumped back in shock! But why? According to him, the guitar work on Know Your Enemy was amazing. I jumped back in shock! But... I never noticed! So caught up was I in the Manics not sounding like the Manics anymore!

So, recently, I've tried to rediscover the Manics, this album in particular. It's not a very good introduction but there really are some good tracks on there. My favourite being So Why So Sad, which is an odd ditty that sounds like James has the same crush on Brian Wilson that I do. Stuff like Let Robeson Sing and Found That Soul has also kind of aged better. I find myself enjoying it a lot more than before. Maybe it's because I'm older, maybe it's because it so poppy, maybe it's because... I don't care, it just sounds better. I haven't discovered the amazing guitar work yet but I'm sure it's in there since my aforementioned friend is also a really amazing guitarist. Let me know if you find it though.

God, my writing has become really lazy all of a sudden. Oh well, WORKING WILL DO THAT TO YOU. Now I will proceed to get drunk to Serge Gainsbourg.


Know Your Enemy (drop.io)