You know those old sticks in the mud who complain that all new music sucks? Yeah, they can shut right up. Finding new music that you like is easier than it ever has been, thanks to the internet. And yet you still have people listening to the same twenty songs over and over on their classic rock radio stations. You have to put a little effort in to find the good stuff these days (as I said though, a lot less effort than you would have 15 years ago or earlier), but it’s there. If your complaint is that a genre that was popular in past decades isn’t popular anymore or is apparently “dead”, I guarantee you, if you look hard enough you’ll find some band, somewhere in the world, playing that genre. And, although this is somewhat beside the point, you can always dig up older music that never made it to the radio too, and listen to that. I’ve discovered tons of great obscure early 1980s New Wave in just the past few years, for example.
2020 was a horrible year. I have writtenextensively on this topicon the blog already, I needn’t repeat myself here. Despite being an objectively awful year, there were a few minor bright spots that made the world just a little bit less miserable. For me, a big one was the music that came out this year. It seemed like I was discovering great new music left and right. I couldn’t always give each band the individual attention it deserved because I kept finding more and more new music. What happened a lot this year actually, was a band would release a new album after having been around for years, promote it through the podcasts and YouTube channels I listen to, and that would be the first I had ever heard of the band, leaving me with robust discographies to get through. Another thing I have been seeing more lately is bands releasing prolific amounts of music in the form of singles or short albums of about four tracks or so. I wonder if the “release a new album with around ten songs every 2-5 years” model is slowly going away in the modern music scene. I’m seeing more and more bands release singles every month or two. I would never have been this inundated with new music back when you had to peruse record stores for CDs and hope the album was as good as its cover art. I will likely be discovering music that came out this year for many years to come. That always happens; a few years from now I will discover a song that was released in 2020 and wish I had heard it when it came out. However, 2020 was a rough year especially for the underground kinds of bands I listen to, because sadly touring was rendered impossible starting in March. So it became even more important to buy music from the bands you like to support them. On the plus side though this likely gave a lot of them time to record new music, and livestream concerts became more widespread too.
The only physical releases I bought this year were cassettes, ironically. I didn’t buy any new albums on CDs. Otherwise I bought digital albums and then burned the MP3s onto blank CDs. Vinyl records are too pricy for me. This all would have seemed really strange just ten years ago. But, these are my 13 favorite albums and EPs I was aware of during the actual year, in no particular order and adhering to no one particular genre (although given my musical tastes, this is mainly going to be post-punk/coldwave/darkwave/dark alternative, anything goth).
Slow Danse With the Dead - SDWTD
Slow Danse With the Dead was apparently very prolific both this year and last year. I initially thought their album SDWTD was their debut, because it is self-titled and this album was the first I heard from them, but no, as you can see by their Bandcamp, it was not. Although the project was formerly known as The Endless, which might explain it. I have discussed this one-man band from New Mexico on several occasions on this blog, and it was one of my favorite newly-discovered bands this year. 2020 was the perfect time to release such sarcastically miserable tracks like “So Obnoxious” (which cautions the listener about being overly optimistic) and “Awaiting My Death” (which is self explanatory) although there’s a touch of humor and irony to the tracks. I ended up purchasing the album on cassette last summer. The band has had five releases just since then, although mainly singles. Seems there’s new music every month. I can’t think of another musician that releases music this often, since I’ve known of them. “I Look Like Death” was the other full length album I purchased from them this year, which is almost a continuation of this album, and worth checking out too. As all their music is.
Favorite Tracks: “So Obnoxious”, “I Tried to be the Nice Guy”
Minuit Machine is a French coldwave group helmed by Helene de Thoury, who is also in Hante. This release is gripping and darkly intense, with themes of fear and facing that fear. A perfect soundtrack for this year. I have discussed this album on the blog before. It is only four tracks, but they are really good ones. There are albums out there with more than ten tracks that still don’t come anywhere near this intensity. It may only be four tracks but it feels longer.
Favorite Tracks: “Don’t Run from the Fire”, “To Control”
Electrotsoy is a Russian post-punk band from the city of Arkhangelsk. The album title translates to “Nostalgia”, and this was their debut EP. My Russian isn’t that good at all so I couldn’t find out a lot about the band, but the music is right up my alley, being low energy, melancholic yet soothing, at times almost dreamlike. I would compare them to a Russian version of The Cure, but with female vocals. It taps into a longing nostalgia for brighter days, which I imagine is a common sentiment throughout the former Soviet Union. Google Translate was my friend in deciphering the song titles. I first encountered the band on a Russian Doomer Music playlist on YouTube, although they’re not very “doomer”, really. This would appear to be their debut album if their Bandcamp is anything to go by. There are only four tracks, but they’re quite good in my opinion. Hoping to hear more from them soon.
Selofan was another great darkwave band I discovered this year, although they have been around for a few years already. I love the country of Greece so it is exciting to hear my type of music coming from there. This new album came out after I had only known of the band for less than a year, adding more fuel to the fire as I gradually worked my way through their discography. Each song off this album was another treat. Even though they’re Greek they sometimes sing in German too, such as in the haunting track “Zusammen”, among others. “Absolutely Absent” was my favorite track on the album, since it kind of hit close to home for me back in October and I found it rather relatable.
Disclaimer (2/4/2021): For the vast majority of the bands I listen to, I know little to nothing about the band members personally. I just enjoy the music for what it is, I don’t think about what their political opinions are. I would rather not know their political opinions, really. Not everyone is going to have my specific worldview, and if I only listened to music whose creators did, maybe I would have a very small pool of music to choose from. But it’s recently come to my attention that the members of Tearful Moon harbor some very extreme far-right viewpoints, which I do not agree with, that are harmful to others, and they’ve been publicly expressing those viewpoints using their platform. It’s a complicated issue for some people separating the art from the artist. And they do create good music. I mean for example, John Kricfalusi created Ren & Stimpy, one of my favorite cartoons growing up and a big influence on my art, and yet he was a rapist. I can’t just cut that piece of my past out of my life so easily, but I don’t want to support that kind of behavior either. So my solution in this case is I am going to leave this review here just for posterity, because it WAS an album I bought and enjoyed in 2020, but with this disclaimer. Their viewpoints do not reflect my own. I just hope the band members will one day start to see the bigger picture and change their worldview.
This album came out right around the time I first discovered Tearful Moon, in April, so I experienced it at the same time I experienced their earlier albums in their discography, making it a bit difficult to separate in my mind. But, after I purchased the digital album and burned it on a blank CD, I got to listen to it properly. The songs flow together well. And what a racy album cover, hope I don’t get in trouble sharing that. Gives the phrase “eyes up here” a new twist; you can both stare at her chest and be making eye contact! Ahem, back on topic. True to Tearful Moon’s style in the past, the songs are almost like poems set to music. I know you could technically say that about all bands that have lyrics in their music, but somehow the songs remind me more of poems than songs sometimes. I could imagine finding these lyrics in a poetry book. I like that about this band. Similar in style to bands like SYZYGYX, Selofan and Lebanon Hanover who also use low, droning and sometimes echoing female vocals, the singer still manages to carry a rhythm and be unconventionally catchy. Even if they are a little similar to the bands I mentioned I wouldn’t confuse a Tearful Moon song with a song from any other band. My favorite song on the album has to be “I Love You More than Death”, both for its catchy rhythm and its shocking and kind of funny lyrics, being from the point of view if someone who loves you more than literally anything, wants you to make them their wife, take them to bed and have their child. You don’t hear a song like that everyday.
Favorite Tracks: “I Love You More than Death”, “The Lost King”
Velvet Kills - Bohdi Labyrinth
Velvet Kills is a band out of Portugal. After hearing the track “The Key” on one of the many YouTube music channels I am subscribed to, I had to check this band out. “The Key” is the catchiest and most upbeat song on the album, and is still my favorite, but the rest of the tracks are also great. My second favorite is the opening track “Bitch Face”. Fun title, isn’t it? If you look at the Bandcamp page for the album all the tracks have a deeper meaning and interconnect, it’s actually kind of a concept album. I recommend checking this one out.
Forever Grey is among my favorite bands I found out about this year, and I mainly found out about them through the promotion for this album back in March. “Lost in a Moment” was the song that grabbed me when I first heard it, and I had to hear more. As I toured their discography, their 2016 album “Alabaster Chamber” turned out to be my favorite album due to the songs “The Style is Death” and “Cathedral of Hailstone”, but this album is still really good too and worth hearing.
Favorite tracks: “Lost in a Moment”, “Labour of Death”
Kalte Nacht is another Greek minimal synth band that emerged earlier this year with this self-titled debut. I picked it up after hearing “Humans Are Mistakes”. The rest of the songs were just as good, with dark and twisted synths paired with low, echoing female vocals. Their sound reminds me a lot of their fellow Greek band Selofan, but they also have a uniqueness to their music. Songs like “Inmost Desire” and “Voices in Silence” are up-tempo and danceable, while there are plenty of slow and brooding tracks like “Ghost Dance” and “ Humans are Mistakes” too. There’s a variety. As a debut release this shows a lot of promise, and I eagerly await whatever Kalte Nacht releases next.
Favorite Tracks: “Humans Are Mistakes”, “Ghost Dance”
I have been listening to this band out of Belarus quite a lot in the past couple of months. They fall under the same umbrella as a lot of the bands in the Russian post-punk scene, which has been my focus lately. Given that I haven’t known this band for very long, such as with Tearful Moon earlier in the year, I am experiencing their newest album at the same time as their earlier music. I quite enjoy their 2018 album “Etazhi”, maybe even a bit better than this album, but they both seem equally as new to me, I enjoy this band’s aesthetic, and it’s one that seems to be catching on and creating its own little sub genre. Their album covers and music videos feature decaying Soviet buildings and monuments, and it almost seems like a good soundtrack for Chernobyl. Molchat Doma has been a gateway drug for me into Russian post-punk, and I thank them for that.
This album was highly anticipated among fans of darkwave and post-punk. Just when the global pandemic really started to kick in last spring, they released their single from this album “The Last Thing” with a music video in which they performed a concert next to the prestigious venue of a dumpster in a back alley, which despite being a really bleak and kind of terrifying song about someone’s thoughts during their last living moments, cheered everyone up somehow. We had to wait until late October for the full album though, but it didn’t disappoint. It is a perfect 2020 album. You almost wonder if they recorded some of these songs before or after the pandemic hit, but there’s no way they could all be that recently written.
Favorite Tracks: “The Last Thing”, “Living on the Edge”
This album snuck in right at the end of the year, having been released on December 6th, making me glad I held off on posting this blog entry for a while (I started writing this in late November). I first saw the track “Shadows” shared on the YouTube channel Sounds in the Distance, one of my sources for new music, and I liked it. Couple days later I heard the track “Dissociate” on the YouTube channel George in the Darkness, and I realized this must have been an album that just released and these channels are helping promote it. I checked it out on Bandcamp, and it’s name your price so I had no excuse not to buy it. And I like all the tracks on it. And that is a typical story of how I discovered new music this year. This isn’t even their debut album either. By the looks of it they’re another one of those bands that’s been prolifically releasing a new music almost every month this year. I have a lot of music to get through. Into Grey joins the ranks of Cabaret Grey and Forever Grey as grey-themed goth bands I like. Grey is the new black. They should all go on tour together when the pandemic is over. The Grey Tour.
For an album called Picture Perfect, sure is an odd choice for album cover though.
Alright, here’s my one non-goth album from 2020 that I liked, an electro-swing concept album by singer and animator OR3O (is it pronounced “oreo” or “or-thirty”?) This is a rather unorthodox pick, as it hasn’t been released physically or as a digital album to my knowledge, at least not yet, and the album in its entirety hasn’t been completely released yet, and will likely be completed in 2021. The songs are accompanied by animated music videos, done in a 1930s animation style. The story behind the album is that a young girl named Kel has fallen into depression with the death if her grandfather. She is visited by three ghosts from the past who tell her their life stories and try to impart their wisdom on her. Each song is unique, in a modern swing style. I’ve long liked this type of music, when I’m in the mood for it. As a cartoonist myself I enjoy this album on two different levels, due to the animated music videos. It’s worth checking out.
And now to round off the list with another album I got on cassette, Mortiis’ Spirit of Rebellion (the one on the right; I’m trying to reuse my pictures on Blogger). It was areturn to form for Mortiis as it showcases the same atmospheric, dark ambient musical style as his albums from the 1990s, a genre since dubbed Dungeon Synth. I purchased this album at a concert in Tampa back in late January; incidentally the only concert I was able to attend this entire year, just a month or so before everything hit the fan.
It’s a genre you either like or you don’t. For me, it’s good background music to put on when doing something else like working on art or writing. You could meditate to it as well, and it will bring to mind images of dusty old Nordic castles and towering fjords, creepy old wizards and medieval dark lords in black armor. Things like that. I have to be in the right mood for it. It’s nothing like my favorite Mortiis album The Smell of Rain. But, Mortiis is quite varied.
Since the album consists of only three tracks, two of them longer than 20 minutes, let’s just say I enjoyed the whole album.
VHS tapes, especially ones recorded off the TV, are a link to my past. Watching them brings me back to simpler times. It is also fun to watch the things I enjoyed as a kid, and analyze it with the mind of an adult. One year ago, I posted a pretty fun blog about my Christmas-themed recorded VHS tape from 1989, dubbed the He-Man She-Ra Christmas Special Tape, in which I did just that. That is a tape that's been with me almost my whole life. But it's not the only Christmas tape I have. Ten years later, in 1999, I recorded another one. Kind of a sequel, in a way. And I'm here to discuss that tape; The Gwangi Christmas Tape. Why "Gwangi"? Because it features the movie The Valley of Gwangi on it, among other things; a movie that's not really holiday-themed, being about some cowboys finding a valley in the desert where dinosaurs still survived, but pretty much everything else on the tape is. Above is the cover of the tape, an old Memorex HS. The tape itself is from the 1980s, and was probably formerly a tape of my mom’s that she let me record over. But that just means it’s a good tape. VHS tapes were built much sturdier in the 80s as opposed to the late 90s. The label you see there had to be updated after this most recent viewing, as I recorded over it again a couple more times after the initial 1999 recordings. It’s been quite a few years since I watched it actually, so going in I don’t remember everything that’s on this other than a few key things; The Valley of Gwangi, the first Futurama Christmas episode, Ernest Saves Christmas. Anyway, let’s pop this thing into the VCR and see what shape it’s in. If I find any of it on YouTube I will post it so you can watch along. (Update: Very little of it is, sadly).
Archie’s Weird Mysteries
So there used to be this channel called PAX. It was mainly a Christian network but they played other odd shows and cartoons. I specifically remember watching the Super Mario Bros. Super Show on that channel in the 90s. It was also one of the few channels you could get with a TV antenna; which believe it or not my family used on and off whenever they couldn’t afford cable. Yeah, there’s something my son will never understand. I feel old now. Well, they also aired this Archie cartoon that I never saw anywhere else. Looks like YouTube has every episode, which is a sure sign it’s obscure. I’ve never been that into the Archie comics. I did read the Sonic the Hedgehog comic when it was published by Archie Comics, but not Archie himself really. But, for whatever reason the stories of this teen boy in a polyamorous relationship with two girls have endured through the decades. Archie’s Weird Mysteries features Archie as kind of a paranormal investigator who looks into the supernatural goings on at his high school. In this episode a dumb jock starts enhancing his brain with a special machine the stereotypical nerdy kid at school invented so he can pass a test, and his brain starts expanding. He starts reading people’s thoughts and develops telekinesis. He alienates himself from his friends and dumps his girlfriend, and his powers start to threaten the school. It’s the Dumbass No More trope. Also seems suspiciously like a metaphor for steroid use. Obviously Archie intervenes and the process is reversed with no lasting effects, unlike one would expect if this somehow really happened. Watching it again makes me think about how I will handle tropes and cliches in my own webcomic. My comic Alcatraz Highwill also feature supernatural plots at a High School. I don’t think I was directly inspired by this show because I barely remembered it, but there are slight similarities. These characters are one-dimensional cliches seen in hundreds of other works. I want to write my characters like real people. I might play with cliches, but then subvert them and take them in a realistic direction. If I were writing a plot like this I would probably have the jock character get permanent brain damage as a result. Or for something more supernatural, have him ascend to a higher plane of existence after becoming too smart. Anything but have him end up going back to normal. That’s just lame.
In any case, watching this now as an adult, I’m not too impressed.
The Valley of Gwangi
And now for our feature presentation. I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid, thanks to Jurassic Park. There was a point where I wanted to see every dinosaur movie ever. I am fairly certain I first saw this movie years before I recorded it on this tape, possibly on AMC, a former classic movie channel which is now better known for The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad. Or was last decade, at least. I don’t watch cable anymore. The idea to make a western movie with dinosaurs is a strange one. Perhaps that’s what children wanted to see in the 1960s. It has a pretty slow beginning, where you’re just waiting for the dinosaurs to show up already. But you have to sit through more than a half hour of exposition first. The story is about this businessman who puts on circus-type Buffalo Bill style shows, he comes down to Mexico to try to get a horse off his ex-girlfriend but she throws him out; she has an even better act, involving a pygmy horse that’s supposed to be extinct. The horse later gets stolen by “gypsies” (their words not mine) and returned to the valley it came from. The main character gathers a team of an eccentric paleontologist and some cowboys from a circus show to find the valley. When they get there, the valley is full of stop motion dinosaurs. The stop motion effects aren’t bad really, you can tell a lot of work was put into them. They look no more fake than some of the computer animation from movies these days. Anyway, greed overtakes the characters, who look to exploit these dinosaurs for their show. Eventually they manage to wrangle up an Allosaurus who they name Gwangi. Since Allosaurus was from the Jurassic era it makes even less sense than if it were a Tyrannosaurus, from the more recent Cretaceous era. But, they obviously weren’t concerned with realism. They try to put Gwangi in their show but he escapes, eats a stop motion elephant, and then terrorizes the city. A bunch of people get eaten and stepped on. The climax does make sitting through the rest of the movie worth it. It’s hilarious. Gwangi chases the main characters into a large cathedral. The protagonist causes a fire that burns the building down, killing poor Gwangi as onlookers watch teary-eyed. Even though this is all their fault and they should have left the valley alone. Greedy idiots. I dislike all of the human characters in this movie, the real hero was Gwangi.
The Simpsons
What a pleasant surprise to find an episode of The Simpsons on the tape. It’s the episode “Grift of the Magi”. Pretty sure this is a recording from the original airing too, which according to Wikipedia was December 19, 1999. Now I can definitely date the tape. It is nice to see the old episodes every now and then, since it’s a show I don’t watch often anymore. It’s the first Christmas-themed thing on this tape, although it’s not really about Christmas until halfway through the episode. Through a convoluted series of events Springfield Elementary gets shut down, and to reopen they have to let it get bought out by a toy corporation that is using the children for market research. I could see this happening in real life. It’s almost a prediction of the corporate espionage that takes place on social media. It’s an okay episode, still got a couple chuckles from me at points, but by 1999 the show was already a little bit past its prime. Which says something about the last 21 years of the show. Much has been written about how The Simpsons is so beyond its prime now it’s practically a reanimated corpse of its former self kept alive through necromancy that its corporate owners refuse to let die since it is still somehow making money. If it still has an audience they must be watching it as a guilty pleasure and not telling anyone. I have never heard of anyone watching and enjoying the recent seasons. I personally stopped watching sometime in the early 2000s. I thought the movie that came out in 2007 was alright, but even that was the first good Simpsons content in years. It was the last of The Simpsons I enjoyed. I have tried a couple of times since to watch an episode, and it just wasn’t the same. Too formulaic and unfunny. Even the voice actors are getting too old and are unable to do the same voices after all these years. The show wouldn’t have gotten this stale if the characters were allowed to age up. That’s a problem with long-running animated shows like this and South Park. It limits the plot ideas you can pull off, and it even messes with the canon of the show. Homer would have been born in the 1980s at this point. He’s a millennial. Soon the show will be older than him. I was 4 years old when this show started and pretty soon I’m going to be Homer’s age. Just let them age up, or stop the show already. You don’t have to age them up at a real-time rate, but do it every few years. Sheesh.
Futurama
This was my favorite show from about 1999 to 2001. Watching it now, it’s very much a product of when it was made, which is ironic given that it takes place in the future. Much as The Jetsons was basically “the 1960s with robots and flying cars”, Futurama is “the late 90s/early 2000s with robots and flying cars”. Jokes in this episode such as Conan O’Brian losing his legs in the war of 2012 have aged very poorly. Characters constantly talk about events 1,000 years prior too. How often do you bring up celebrities from the year 999 AD in casual conversation? It was pretty normal in this show to have pop culture humor that was horribly dated only a couple years after the episode was made. Did they not think anyone would be watching this show twenty years later? I think the same thing when I watch Back to the Future II. Obviously they were written as comedies and I’m probably taking them too seriously. But, I’ve never been one for shallow, quickly-outdated pop culture humor. The show was at its best when it avoided such things and focused more on storytelling, character development and world building. I suppose they were written for their current audience, not for a future one. It tells you more about the world when it was made than it does about the actual future. It’s more surprising when something they predict still sounds plausible, or even accurate. Another joke in this episode, that global warming was cancelled out by nuclear winter, was actually a good one that’s aged well.
This episode is “XMas Story”. It’s Fry’s first Christmas in the future and he’s homesick. Christmas is officially called XMas in the year 3000. Leela, an orphaned cyclops, is depressed as well. Fry wants to get her a gift, but is warned about an evil robotic Santa who kills anyone he considers naughty, which is almost everyone. He gets her a parrot, which escapes. He climbs up a tower to get it back and gets stuck on a giant digital clock, in a more modern homage to the Harold Lloyd film Safety Last! where he gets stuck on a clock. I always liked that gag. Leela saves him, but soon, the evil Santa comes for them. It’s a pretty funny twist on Santa, and the episode holds up well as a Christmas special.
Rocko’s Modern Life
Another goody I forgot I had on this tape. Rocko’s Modern Life is a cartoon from the channel Nickelodeon. Out of all the “Nicktoons” as they were called, it actually stands up the best as an adult. It satirized everyday life in modern America, and at times seemed much as if it were aimed at adults. I like it even more now than I did as a kid because I understand it better now. It’s aged better than Futurama, and didn’t stick around forever and get stale like The Simpsons.
This is the Christmas episode, “Rocko’s Modern Christmas”. Rocko is planning a Christmas party with his friends Heffer and Filbert. Once they find out about it they start inviting other people and it ends up becoming way huger than the small get together he anticipated. We follow his misadventures trying to buy supplies for the party. Meanwhile some elves move in to the house across the street from him. Rocko meets one of the elves at the mall and helps him back home. They make toys, and he invites them to the party as well. Rocko’s grouchy next-door neighbor Mr. Bighead is prejudiced against elves and endeavors to sabotage Rocko’s party by telling everyone elves have foot fungi. So sadly no one shows up to the party, except for the one elf he met at the mall, who makes it snow, and it’s a big miracle. The next morning everyone shows up, astonished by the snow that only fell around Rocko’s house, and they end up having the party after all.
Eh, as far as episodes of this show go, it isn’t one of my favorites really. It’s a little boring. For a show that was so good at satirizing modern life, they played things pretty straight in this episode. I would have expected maybe a critique on the rampant consumerism of Christmas, or other negative aspects of the holiday season. Not that it was the most cynical show, but this episode needed a little more cynicism to make it a less generic Christmas episode. It’s not the show at its best. My favorites episodes are the ones that revolve around Mr. Bighead, honestly. He’s hilarious. I always end up relating to grumpy, curmudgeonly characters it seems.
Ernest Saves Christmas
Next on the tape is this classic, recorded off the Disney Channel. The channel was never as good after it went from premium to basic cable, but this was before their era of inane sitcoms for preteen girls.
Oh Ernest. To this day he is an enduring character. Too pure for this cruel world. And this film, as silly as it is, has a kind of innocent sincerity to it that is refreshing, if you’re in the right mood for it. I still have a soft spot for this movie after all these years, even as I have become bitter and cynical in my adulthood. And now that I’ve lived in Florida a few years I understand this movie even better. Not a lot of Christmas movies take place in Florida, where it’s often 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Christmas, but this one does. Christmas in Florida just feels kind of fake, like everyone wishes they were someplace where it snowed. Some holidays really don’t translate well across different climates, Christmas most of all. This was filmed on location too, I recognize the freeway to the Orlando airport at the beginning.
The film features perhaps the most believable Santa I have seen on film. Everyone thinks he’s a delusional senile old man who just thinks he’s Santa, but I wonder if I met him in real life he’d have me believing his story. Then I’d ask him why he gives rich kids better presents than poor kids. Anyway, the guy he wants to pass the title of “Santa” to isn’t nearly as good of an actor. A former children’s show host, the movie clearly wants him to be some Mr. Rogers type of person but I just never felt convinced for some reason. Nor does he look like Santa; even at the end of the movie when he’s got the beard and outfit on there’s just something off about him. It could be just because he’s juxtaposed with the best film Santa ever, and it’s a tough act to follow.
The main highlights of the film are wholesome Santa, and the antics of Ernest. The subplot about the runaway teen girl who becomes Ernest’s sidekick was kind of odd and not very believable, although I will say she looks like a Floridian. I could imagine bumping into her at a kava bar in Pinellas Park. The subplot of the two Laurel and Hardy wannabes getting a shipment of flying reindeer doesn’t really do anything for me. Maybe they were funnier in Ernest Scared Stupid, or maybe that’s the nostalgia goggles talking. In all, it’s a silly but overall harmless movie, probably best enjoyed if you saw it as a kid and have nostalgic feelings tied up with it like I do.
Ren & Stimpy
Yes, one of my favorite cartoons! The source of my bizarre and twisted sense of humor. This is a Christmas episode, “A Scooter for Yaksmas”. A Yaksmas episode, technically. Ren & Stimpy is a very surreal show, known for its gross-out comedy. I had forgotten this episode existed. It’s one of the later ones, after the show’s creator John K. was kicked off the show. The show was very hit-or-miss after that. So in this episode, Stimpy wants a Scooter for Yaksmas, and drops several very obvious hints at Ren. Yaksmas is a bizarre alternative universe version of Christmas where an old hillbilly named Stinky Wizzle-teats breaks into your home, stuffs your socks with meat byproducts, vandalizes your home in several depraved ways, and passes out on the lawn. Ren doesn’t end up getting Stimpy the scooter, leaving him heartbroken. He goes to the store, and snaps, ending up stealing the scooter. He then becomes a fugitive, and decides to travel to Stinky Wizzle-teats at the West Pole for help. When he gets there he sees a present that Ren got him, which was the scooter after all. I used to be all about this absurd show. To be honest, I still am.
Christmas Comes to Pac-Land
Cartoon Network used to dig up every obscure Christmas Special ever this time of year. And this was one of them. There was a Pac-Man cartoon in the 1980s. One of the first video game cartoons, and not nearly as good as the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon. Maybe I just recorded it because I was in awe that it existed. At some point, around 1996 to 1997, I was obsessed with Pac-Man thanks to the game Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures for Sega Genesis. The game was a lot like this cartoon, starring a Pac-Man with arms and legs, who lived in a house with Ms. Pac-Man and his family. It was basically a point-and-click game rather than the familiar arcade maze game. I don’t even really know why I liked it so much, but it was probably why I recorded this cartoon, where Santa crash lands in Pac-land, some alternate Earth where people have yellow ball bodies, and Pac-Man has to find his lost toys. I can only imagine what a blow it would have been to my edgy self image in 1999 if the other kids at school knew I’d been watching this. A part of me still feels embarrassed. Remnants of an old feeling that’s been beaten out of me in the years since. This special is really dumb though.
Four Tex Avery MGM Cartoon Shorts
This was a welcome surprise. What a jackpot. And they have nothing to do with Christmas. I completely forgot I had these on here. Tex Avery is my favorite classic cartoonist, his shorts were the funniest, and a bit more adult than other cartoons of the time, a reminder that back then cartoons were shown in movie theaters and were more for general audiences than just kids. As close as you could get in the 1940s to The Simpsons and South Park. And MGM is my favorite overall classic cartoon studio. They had Tex Avery, Tom and Jerry, and I like the other cartoons they had too. They also had higher production values, on par with Disney. I probably recorded this a little later, it’s from the channel Boomerang, which I didn’t have yet in 1999. It’s taken forever to get Tex Avery shorts released on DVD (I think there was finally a set released last year or something), they’re not on the big streaming services, Warner Bros. greedily takes them down when they get uploaded to YouTube, so these VHS recordings are a good way to still see them, and for a long time they were the only way. The first short is “The Cat that Hated People” directed by Tex Avery, about a cat that tries to leave Earth because he has been mistreated by humans, only to find the moon to be a zany and psychedelic place (a ripoff of the Looney Tunes short “Porky in Wackyland”, actually).
Second short is “Swing Shift Cinderella”, a sequel to the Tex Avery short “Red Hot Riding Hood” featuring the alluring dancer Red (the original Jessica Rabbit; who’s slightly more realistic body proportions make her more attractive than Jessica in my opinion) and the Wolf, who becomes enraptured over her and does a bunch of wild takes like his eyes popping out and such. This one is almost as good as the first Red short.
After that we have “Red Hot Rangers”, a short featuring Tex Avery’s recurring characters George and Junior, based on George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men. A fire imp sprouts from someone’s discarded cigarette in the forest, and George and Junior, working as forest rangers, have to put it out. Cartoony gags ensue as the bumbling duo fail over and over again to douse the pesky fire imp.
The marathon continues with “The Screwy Truant”, starring Screwy Squirrel. Screwy Squirrel was a deliberately exaggerated parody of the screwball cartoon character (like the early Daffy Duck for instance) that punishes their hapless victims, with very little if any provocation, yet remaining the protagonist the audience is supposed to root for. Here he is ditching school, and being chased down by a dog acting as a truant officer. I am pretty glad this sort of thing was obsolete by the time I was in school. School is already too much like prison without being chased by officers and forced to go.
This is the last thing on the tape. Overall the tape is longer and has more to offer than the He-Man She-Ra Christmas Special tape. It’s not quite as iconic in my mind though. It was nice watching it again, a trip down memory lane. It took me more than two weeks to get through the whole thing and write this, to be honest. I have another Christmas tape I can watch and review next year, so if we all survive 2021 and you like reading what I have on these old recorded VHS tapes stay tuned for that.
Oz books are always a great distraction from the real world. As is critiquing them. On the eve of its falling into the public domain on January 1st, I finally read The Lost King of Oz, the 19th volume of the Famous Forty Oz books, and fifth book by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Like it or not this book is a pivotal one in the series; it features the return of Mombi, not seen since the 2nd book The Marvelous Land of Oz, and the return of the titular King of Oz, Pastoria, who went missing long before the events of the first book. When she inherited the Oz series, Thompson ran things as she saw fit. She wasn’t afraid of shaking things up in Oz. She started by giving the Scarecrow a backstory (which falls apart under closer scrutiny), and soon Oz was gaining new independent kingdoms left and right (it’s as if towns and mayors don’t exist in Oz, every little town has to be its own gimmicky little kingdom), and new mainstay characters like Kabumpo the Elephant and the Yellow Knight. Ozma was a lot less of a pacifist, as we’ll see in this book, and eventually makes Oz a colonial power, quite contrary to the first 14 books. Later writers would be more careful with Oz canon, not wanting to contradict anything Baum wrote, unless deliberately doing their own thing with Oz like Wicked and Dorothy Must Die. But Thompson did as she wished. She did things her own way. No one stopped her, it would seem. She had official backing from the publisher and the go-ahead from Maud Baum, L. Frank Baum’s widow, giving her a level of legitimacy no modern Oz writer will ever have, and this emboldened her.
There are some that really love her books, and there are some that really hate them. But I think most Oz book fans agree that they were pretty hit-or-miss. I think at least some of the criticisms leveled at her are unfair at times; after all, L. Frank Baum also liked to introduce new kingdoms and characters, and forget them just as easily in the next book. Baum too would occasionally decide he wanted to focus on original characters and leave the main characters as mere cameos. His books were also filled with encounters with gimmicky communities that distracted from the main plot. Baum also liked puns almost as much as Thompson did. Even though Thompson didn’t always follow canon, sometimes Baum contradicted his own canon. If someone’s main criticism of Thompson is the racism in some of her books, then I won’t blame them one bit. I don’t like that either. But I think some people don’t like her just because she’s not Baum, overlooking flaws in Baum’s stories while criticizing Thompson for doing the same things he did. As for me, I suppose I’m just pretty forgiving in general when it comes to Oz books because I have a soft spot for them. I fall squarely into the “hit-or-miss” camp when it comes to Thompson. I can see where her detractors are coming from, but I recognize she deserves credit for keeping the series going, and for those of us writing our own Oz stories, she really paved the way. No one’s going to see and interpret Oz exactly like Baum did. Thompson was the first one to interpret Oz in their own unique way after its creator passed away, and any later writer of Oz stories owes her a debt for that. Do I always like her interpretation of Oz, though? No, not always.
With all that said, I have mixed feelings about The Lost King of Oz. Spoilers ahead, by the way.
The main character of the book is Mombi, who is also the main villain. For some reason Thompson seems to have a special hatred for Mombi, since she extended Mombi’s rap sheet and elevated her to be even more evil than she was originally. Even after this book, Mombi gets blamed for new things that happened before Dorothy’s arrival in Oz which were unmentioned by Baum (I’m currently reading The Giant Horse of Oz, which does exactly this). In addition to kidnapping Ozma and switching her gender, she erased King Pastoria’s memory and turned his Prime Minister into a goose. This goose turns up at her new workplace, a kitchen for King Kinda Jolly (take a second to groan at the name), in the small kingdom of Kimbaloo in Gillikin Country (or “Gilliken” as Thompson insists on spelling it for some reason). The goose, Pajuka, is on the menu, despite Oz being a vegan fairyland where “meat” grows on trees, and where all animals have human-level intelligence and talk. Evidently the barbaric residents of Kimbaloo are still carnivorous despite this. Anyway, upon being reunited with the former Prime Minister, Mombi comes up with a somewhat convoluted plan to find King Pastoria and use him to regain her powers and take over the Emerald City. I don’t know how she thought Glinda, Ozma and the Wizard would simply stand by and allow a powerless former witch to take over Oz, but evidently she didn’t think that far ahead. She kidnaps a boy who overheard her evil scheme, Snip the Button Boy (in addition to being one of the last Oz kingdoms to still murder sentient animals for meat when they could literally find a tree that grows fried chicken if they wanted to, Kimbaloo’s main export is buttons, hence Snip the Button Boy whose clothes is covered in buttons), and forces him to be her pack mule on the long journey. They encounter some forgettable Wacky Wayside Tribes along the way which pad the book out and make it longer.
Eight whole chapters in we finally get our secondary plot (suddenly introducing a subplot almost halfway through the book is a thing Baum did as well), in which Ozma and her friends are given a clue about Pastoria and set out to find him. Before they get the clue we learn that Dorothy has gone off to visit some friends, leaving Ozma sad and lonely. I am glad Thompson preserved their chemistry, and never decided to pair Ozma up with some random prince or something. As you know if you’re familiar with the series, Ozma probably really isn’t into princes, if you catch my drift. Overall their subplot isn’t terribly significant to the main plot. And in chapter 10 we get a third subplot featuring Dorothy Gale. And let me tell you, the wasted opportunities in her subplot make me angrier the more I think about it. After visiting some characters from the previous book Grampa in Oz, she stumbles upon a very convenient Wish Way, a dirt road where your wishes come true if you speak them aloud. Thompson used this plot device in her first Oz book. There are at least two Wish Ways in Oz that we know about. It’s interesting to think of how previous books would have been different if people had known about the Wish Way. Dorothy could have wished herself back to Kansas in the first book, Jinjur could have conquered Oz using it, Ozma could have gone there and simply wished for Ev’s royalty to be freed from the Nome King without having to travel to Ev, Ojo could have wished his uncle not to be turned to stone anymore. There wouldn’t be an Oz series anymore, really. I mean maybe if the Wish Way randomly changed locations periodically it might make for a good occasional plot device, but having it always be in the same spot and not be widely known about and never be used by anyone until they stumble upon it is a little unbelievable. (In my planned Oz book, it’s protected by spells and largely obscure, but Ozites can still find out about it if they read the Oz histories).
Anyway, Dorothy accidentally wishes herself back to America, where she appears at the set of a movie somewhere not far from Hollywood, California (I pictured the whole thing taking place at Kirk’s Rock). After a bit she begins to rapidly age into an adult woman, her true age in 1925 if she had stayed in America. So according to Famous Forty canon, this is what happens when someone from the Outside World travels to Oz and stops aging, and then comes back. If it were to happen in a modern story Dorothy would age to nearly 130 years old and likely die. All of the characters who immigrated to Oz from the Outside World are essentially trapped there now. This makes me question the story in The Lost Tales of Oz, The Wizard in New York by Sam Sackett, where the Wizard of Oz, Oscar Diggs, goes to the 1939 World Fair in New York. Why didn’t he age to 100 or however old he would be in 1939? Of course, it’s up to the reader whether they want to consider modern Oz pastiches canon or not. I like to, just for fun. But surely they could have come up with some magical prevention spell to keep the Wizard from aging, as a nod to what happened to Dorothy when she went back to America. Perhaps the author could be forgiven for forgetting about this chapter in The Lost King of Oz, because Thompson treats it as forgettable. Or maybe it was avoided because the book was still under copyright, I don’t know.
To sum the rest of this chapter up (yes...this one chapter), she accidentally wishes a stunt dummy to life, and wishes herself back to Oz, where she ages back down to a child. What a wasted plot. There could have been an entire book about Dorothy accidentally wishing herself to America and trying to get back to Oz. It could have been a clever inverse to the first Oz book, especially at this late point in the series where Oz is very much Dorothy’s home. It could have been called “There’s No Place Like Oz”. I want to read that book. But no, instead it’s another single-chapter-long, quickly forgotten misadventure just like the other chapters that have the characters visit some bizarre gimmick community, and the only way it impacts the plot at all is to introduce Humpy the stunt dummy. A character who could have been left out of the story altogether without the plot changing much. Another annoyance in this chapter is the line Thompson slips in during Dorothy’s ordeal, “as she afterwards explained to Sir Hokus of Pokes”, indicating Dorothy will get back to Oz and tell the story to her friend the Sir Hokus the Yellow Knight, before it is revealed how she gets back. I mean of course she’ll get back, but way to just remove what little sense of suspense there still was in this episode. I hate when authors spoil their own story like that, it’s a pet peeve of mine. It takes you right out of the story. Wouldn’t want to scare the kids reading by having even an ounce of suspense in the story now would we? Those few words destroyed the entire subplot. Dorothy’s return to America was not treated as importantly as it should have been. This idea with so much potential was wasted just so Thompson could shoehorn this living stunt dummy into the story that didn’t need to be there!
I need to remind myself that there are more important things to be angry at than 95-year-old fantasy stories written for kids. Sigh.
So eventually Mombi gets sick of Snip knowing too much about her plan and throws him down a well, which very conveniently leads Snip to a tailor, Tora, who has been imprisoned by invisible people called the Blanks. This tailor has lost his memory. Hmm, I wonder who he could be? They escape, and rendezvous with Dorothy and the dummy, who have been joined by Kabumpo the elephant, and eventually they meet Mombi. They all come to the conclusion that Humpy the dummy who was just brought to life in America MUST be the lost king, because classism blinds them to the idea that the king might be an amnesiac tailor. Kabumpo even entertains the idea of not allowing Tora to enter the palace because he’s a lowly peasant. Maybe Thompson was trying to make a statement against classism and snobbery here, but reading her other books, I still think she was a lot more classist than Baum. Another example of this is the conspicuous absence of everyone’s favorite and totally not creepy hobo the Shaggy Man from her books. And the fact that just about every book of hers stars royalty or at least has royals as major characters at some point.
Anyway, once the king is revealed at the end of the book, he does not force Ozma to abdicate the throne as some feared, but wishes to continue on as a tailor and let his daughter rule. Thompson could have shaken things up in Oz by having Pastoria take the throne, she had the power to make a decision like that, but she wisely chose not to and kept the status quo going. Fiction needs more strong female rulers, even moreso back in the 1920s, so I think it was the right choice. What’s more debated is the decision for Ozma to order Mombi’s execution via being splashed with water like the Wicked Witch of the West (this was never stated to be the weakness of every witch in Oz). Yes, it would seem Mombi’s attempt to take over Oz was what crossed the line, causing Ozma to break her pacifism. And what’s more, it was meek little Dorothy’s idea to kill her with water. Dorothy, who never killed anyone on purpose before. Now I had already had the ending spoiled for me before I read the book, and was expecting at least an entire chapter devoted to this dramatic event, during which Ozma struggled with the decision, but when I finally read it, I was shocked by how casual and nonchalant the whole thing was. Dorothy and Ozma’s quick decision to kill her to the aftermath of the deed take up barely more than a page in the last chapter.
Whatever happened to the Ozma who, in The Emerald City of Oz, refused to resort to a violent reaction when Oz was being invaded, declaring “No one has the right to destroy any living creatures, no matter how evil they may be, or to hurt them or make them unhappy. I will not fight - even to save my kingdom”? (Aw, you’re making me feel guilty every time I kill a mosquito or cockroach now, Ozma.) Does this sound like the type of person who, when asked if Mombi should be killed, would shrug and reply “Eh, okay.” This is basically what actually happened in the book. Was she replaced by one of Jack Snow’s magical mimics? What happened to Ozma? Well, Thompson happened. She had drastically different ideologies from L. Frank Baum. I bet if she had written the first book, Dorothy would have killed the Wicked Witch of the West on purpose, and would have started moving stuff around in her house as it was falling to aim it at the Wicked Witch of the East.
Part of what got me glued to the Oz series as an adult was L. Frank Baum’s ideology, and Oz being a classless, moneyless and nonviolent fairyland where those who were different were welcomed. The polar opposite of this world. This is all sadly lacking in Thompson’s books. But, some part of me still likes at least some of her books. Handy Mandy in Oz for instance, is my favorite of hers, thanks more to the characters than the plot. Kabumpo in Oz is my second favorite Thompson Oz book, both because of the characters and because it had a plot that kept me guessing what would happen next. I guess what keeps me coming back to Ruth Plumly Thompson is Oz itself, and its characters. And it’s comforting to know there are so many Oz books out there I probably won’t ever run out of them. There’s always going to be another that I haven’t read. So, even if it’s something I’m going to end up heavily criticizing, I still enjoy reading Oz books, if only to escape the real world for a while.
Special thanks to my friend Paul Dana for the book! Otherwise I would have had to wait a few months for it to finally show up on Gutenberg, as it will be public domain in 2021.
Final stretch of 2020. We’re almost there! As if the nightmare will suddenly end when the year on the Gregorian calendar changes. Who knows what fresh Hell 2021 will entail. I do think that we should all be grateful to be alive at the end of this year. Never take it for granted. Never take anything for granted. That’s what I learned this year.
Feels like a lot happened this last month. Been falling deeper down the Russian post-punk rabbit hole. I don’t know why the gothic music podcasts I listen to never play that stuff. Is it because of animosity between Americans and Russians? Even if on a subconscious level? I wonder. For some reason music in general just doesn’t really make it out of Russia much, except maybe to neighboring countries. Even their pop music is a lot better than American pop in my opinion. Well, I know where to find it now on YouTube, so you might see it in my Top 3 more often. Maybe I can help get it to a wider audience in my own tiny little way. But this month there is an assortment, only two Russian bands will appear.
Anyway, because I’ve been bombarded with good music this month I am going to do an extra honorary mention this time, because I can. This can be a Top 5 list instead. If I have the same hard time narrowing it down to just three next month I might just make it a Top 5 every month.
La Scaltra - Neverland
This song came to me at a time I needed it. A calming song about escaping this dark, painful world, flying above the world and going to Neverland. Granted, Neverland wouldn’t be my first choice of a fantasy realm to escape this bleak, unjust world to, that would probably be Oz. Peter Pan is kind of villainous when you think about it, and being an adult myself I suppose I would be joining the pirates anyway. I did a blog entry on that subject once. But, being stuck swabbing Captain Hook’s deck would be better than a desk job at least. Ah, to escape reality and be a carefree child again. I am due for checking out more of La Scaltra’s discography. You may remember the track “Astral Kiss” having been an honorary mention on my Top 3 several months ago. Both that song and this one have mystical qualities that appeal to my longing for escapism.
The lyrics in this song are just a nonstop flow. I can’t imagine trying to sing this in karaoke without fumbling the lyrics or stopping to breathe. But, I always find it catchy when a singer can pull something like this off. It kind of reminds me of “Fieber” by Das Ich, just in terms of the quick-paced, continuous singing style. It’s goth rap. The lyrics are very abstract and I have a hard time interpreting them, but I like the lines “I’m a fool to wander into your night, I’m a fool to wonder of your stars.” What does it mean, to wander into someone’s night? There’s some pretty deep and mysterious symbolism going on in the lyrics of this song.
Even though Molchat Doma isn’t on the list this month (do I need to start making these Top 10 lists?) it casts a long shadow on this month’s picks as my gateway drug into this kind of music. I came across this very melodic Russian post-punk song on one of the Russian Doomer Music playlists, and felt inspired to dig up the individual song, finding this unofficial music video above. The band name here is Mazhnyye Tigry, which if their Bandcamp page is to be trusted translates to Paper Tigers (Google Translate says “Major Tigers”, but they’re not always the most trustworthy). And the song title, Mechty, means “Dreams”. I would like to learn to at least read Russian. I don’t think I have time or money to take classes to become fluent in it though. I’m still not completely fluent in either German or Armenian either. But I want to start studying their alphabet and maybe learning some basic vocabulary.
It’s a song for cold weather. A winter song. Some songs just don’t hit the same outside of a certain season. I don’t know if that’s just me, but then again I don’t think that I am the only one who subconsciously categorizes types of music like that. This is one of three Russian songs I know with this exact title, one of which is by Vitas, another of which is below.
And here’s another song about dreams.The name of this band is Electrotsoy, or Electricity in English, and this song is off a little four-track EP titled “Nostalgia” they released over the summer. Their music is relaxing, soothing but still “goth” enough to be up my alley. Kind of like The Cure but with Russian female vocals. Another band I would compare them to is Glaare, who I guess are considered “shoegaze”. Never really understood that genre name. I’ve heard the term “dreamwave” tossed around too, which this might also qualify as. One of the infinite “wave” genres. But Glaare was the first band I heard with this kind of sound. Anyway I like all the tracks on this album about equally. I went with this one due to the song title. I don’t understand the lyrics, but I understand the feelings.
As an aside, I just made a dream-themed mixtape last spring, and now all the sudden I’m finding all these new dream songs. Sigh, such is life.
If you regularly read my blog you might remember this as the first song on my recent mixtape Սեւ Օրեր. This song translates to “In the Blue”, by the Armenian band The Deenjes. The lyrics actually come from a poem by famed Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents which you can check out here if you’re curious. And no, I can’t seem to find it in English right now. As I talked about in my mixtape blog, Armenia’s current troubles inspired me to go through The Deenjes’ discography again, and this song stuck with me most.
The Deenjes doesn’t have a Bandcamp, their music is for free on YouTube, pretty much the only place you can get it.
Above is my bedroom wall. On the left, a map of Armenia with Artsakh from 2015. On the right, a map of Armenia as defined by the Treaty of Sevres, from 1920. Today, both maps are obsolete.
Thoughts on the Current Situation of Armenia and Artsakh
First, here’s a song about it.
I am still coming to grips with the recent war that cost Artsakh most of
its land and crippled Armenia. The
Armenian genocide is best understood not as a singular event that occurred in
1915, but as an ongoing process that began when the Seljuk Turks invaded the
area in the 1070s and continues to the present. When people think about
genocides they think of the Holocaust, which was done very quickly, in one
dramatic, horrific event. But many, maybe even most genocides, happen across
centuries. It is slow, but methodical and carefully calculated. As it so
happens, committing a complete genocide is harder than it sounds. Whenever the
world is distracted enough, Turkey, and its partner Azerbaijan, take another
step toward its completion. If the organizers of this genocide (who to be fair
are not the regular citizens but their governments) have one virtue, it is
patience. It will not end until Armenians are gone. There will never be peace.
This war was the latest phase of the genocide. This is why it is ridiculous to
tell Armenians to “get over” the genocide because it happened a long time ago.
The genocide is ongoing. It has been going on for nearly a thousand years, and
it is happening right now. Russia may have the power to put the process on
pause, as it has done on and off for the past century, but for how long? As
long as they deem it advantageous to do so, obviously. They don’t do it out of
any sort of moral obligation. There are no morals involved in the way the world
works. If no other greater power is going to put a stop to the genocidal
process, as was completely demonstrated by the deafening silence from the
international community during this most recent war, and Armenia can’t defend itself against Turkey, then Armenia may only last
as long as Russia allows it to last. This is why Armenia must make itself
useful to Russia in order to survive. The West isn’t going to lift a finger to
help Armenia. At most they’ll shake their fists angrily at Turkey from far
away. But they will do nothing. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, to be sure.
Perhaps genocide is a typical
human behavior. Dividing ourselves into warring tribes, trying to eliminate
other tribes. Perhaps it dates back to when homo sapiens eliminated the
Neanderthals and other now-extinct hominids. Humans survived because they were
the most blood-thirsty and cruel of the hominids. They learned to fear and
dehumanize their enemies, which made the killing easier. With the rest of the
hominids gone, humanity turned on itself. Some of us grow past the
dehumanization of anyone different from themselves and are able to shut it off
when it creeps into their subconscious with some effort. But most do not. Racism and bigotry is a remnant from the days other hominids existed. This
little hypothesis of mine is the only thing that makes sense to me when videos
of Azeri soldiers mutilating Armenian prisoners of war, and even civilians, to
their death, surface online. I cannot bring myself to watch such things, but
knowing they exist is haunting enough to make me lose sleep. When you look at
this all from the outside, as perhaps an alien from another world would look at
it, and divorce nationalism from your thoughts, you see it for the madness that
it truly is. Sometimes I envy the Americans around me, so caught up in their
frivolous concerns, never having to worry about whether their country might not
exist tomorrow. So naive and blissfully ignorant. Their security was
accomplished through the genocide of Native Americans, of course. Meanwhile I
get to have these thoughts going through my head. Whenever I think or write
about something else (as I will soon on this blog, I promise), it is merely to
distract myself from this existential dread. I am beginning to think perhaps
those who do not have depression are just good at not thinking about the world
around them and keeping themselves distracted, with their heads in the sand.
I’m not very good at that. You might as well call excessive thinking a mental
illness.
In the aftermath of the
war, I have seen Armenians looking for someone to blame in all this. Some go
after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Maybe it is his fault. Some go after the
oligarchs who ruled before him. Maybe we should pin all the blame on them.
Maybe it’s both. I don’t know if I’m for or against Pashinyan myself, although I lean more towards being for him. But I don’t live in Armenia, so it doesn’t matter really. I will say that there
isn’t a politician on Earth that I fully trust, though. Some, who I think see
the bigger picture, see that everyone’s a little bit to blame. Perhaps there is
validity in that, and we should each look at our own guilt and self-reflect. I
lost a relative in the war; Hayk Mkrdchyan, a young man with too much life
ahead of him to die. My family in America was able to put together some money to send over to his immediate family, which made me feel better.
Like I had done something. But really, there wasn’t much I could do about this war.
Maybe my fault in all this was choosing to return to America after my time in
Armenia. I probably could have had a career there. My Masters degree in
Creative Writing would actually mean something over there, unlike here. But,
many people would have been upset with me if I made the decision to stay. In
the end, I didn’t choose Armenia when I had the chance. I chose my loved ones
and family. I would have felt some guilt no matter the choice I made, but I
admit my fault. I sure didn’t go back because I prefer America, though. I would
rather live in Armenia if it weren’t for my family. Although I would like to
move to Armenia with my family one day, who knows when I will actually have the
money to even do that. In 2015, I naively thought I would be back to visit
Armenia in a couple years, but I barely ever even get to travel to visit family
in California, let alone make trips to Armenia. Lack of time and money. My
individual choice not to stay may not have amounted to much, but too many
diasporans who could move to Armenia and unlike me actually have the means to,
don’t. And too many native Armenians leave. Perhaps the wealthy diasporans have
the same excuses I have. But if I were as wealthy as Cher or Serj Tankian, I'd
bring my wife and son over to live in Armenia, and still have plenty of money
to fly back to visit family in America once or twice a year. Anyway, you can
blame a million different things, but the loss of this war is our collective
shame. Even despite Turkey’s unexpected involvement (as I have heard, Armenia
may have been able to repel an attack from Azerbaijan alone, but not with
Turkey’s NATO-empowered army and Syrian mercenaries involved), it still didn’t
have to be this way. It could have ended worse too, but it also could have
ended a lot better.
Travels in Artsakh, 2015
The preceding rant may
as well have been a blog entry all its own. I don’t really know who I am
writing this blog entry for; if I really wanted to, I could try writing
something for the Armenian Weekly again. But, perhaps I would rather have a
smaller audience for this. Maybe it’s because of my distaste for online
arguments. Let me instead share the pictures of my trip to Artsakh in 2015, and
discuss the trip. To look back at my pictures from my trip to Artsakh in May of
2015 is heartbreaking now. To know that many of the buildings I saw are now in
ruins, to know that many of the cities and monasteries I visited are now in the
hands of Azerbaijan, and the history of the region will be cleansed and
rewritten, to know that a lot of the people I met may now be homeless or dead.
I will likely never be able to revisit some of these places. But, at the same
time, I feel that reflecting on these photos and sharing them is something I
must do. Part of the grieving process, perhaps. I must not forget the five days
I spent in Artsakh. Free, independent Artsakh, from 1994 to 2020. For a tiny
sliver of that time, I was there. I shared in its independence. It may have
been a short five days I spent there, but it was an important five days of my
life. Those days are even more important now than they felt when it happened.
These pictures are evidence of what was there before. Lest the world forget. We
live in a time when we can easily take photographs, unlike 1915.
I went on a trip
organized by Birthright Armenia. They were able to get us into places most
normal tourists wouldn’t have been able to. It was a long bus ride from
Yerevan, made longer by a stop at Tatev monastery in the Syunik province on the
way (not that I’m complaining of course, that’s a worthy trip in and of
itself). We arrived on May 8th, an important day in Artsakh, as the anniversary
of the Armenian liberation of the city of Shushi in 1992. We had a dinner party
at a fancy hotel in Shushi with some retired soldiers who fought in the war,
and danced together after dinner. We then stayed with a host as their guests,
almost a Bed and Breakfast kind of arrangement, in Shushi, which would be our
base of operations as we traveled elsewhere in Artsakh. I myself stayed with a
kindly old woman, who lived alone, having lost her family in Artsakh’s war of
independence in the early 1990s. I will always remember the breakfasts she put
together. Some of the most delicious food; the local cheese and honey was
amazing, something I have never tasted before or since. I don’t know what’s
become of her now. Now that Shushi is in Azeri hands.
Shushi
I can’t leave. There was something else written around the corner. I thought I had a picture of it but I can’t find it.
Stepanakert
The Land
A Visit to a Farm
A Village Winery
I wish I remembered the name of the village; then I would be able to tell if it was still in Artsakh’s current borders.
A vinyard
Downtown Stepanakert
Gandzasar Monastery
A missile hit this wall in the war back in the 1990s.
Foggy Shushi
Ghazanchetsots Cathedral
A bombed university from the 1920s
I think this was in Stepanakert. The blatant disregard for copyright amused me, but you can get away with such things in unrecognized countries.
The Museum of Fallen Soldiers
Portraits of fallen soldiers.
A symbolic model of the gates of Shushi.
A wedding that never happened, because the groom died in the war. This display made me very emotional.
Stepanakert
I recently saw a photo online of this very building, being repaired after the war. At least it still stands, as far as I know.
A portrait of famous Armenian composer Komitas.
The abandoned Stepanakert airport.
The famous statue, “We are our Mountains”.
No one ever takes pictures of the back of this statue, so I did.
The parking lot in front of the statue, also rarely photographed
Shushi
On the last day in Artsakh, Birthright Armenia organized a hike around the gorges of Shushi. I was too tired to go, and I wanted some solitude. So I slept in. And then, I explored the streets of Shushi on my own, taking in its energy. A nice, peaceful and serene walk on a cool, foggy day. It just might be my favorite memory from the whole trip, because I finally got to break away from the group, do my own thing, and experience Artsakh in my own way. It is something I am glad I did. Particularly now that Shushi has been taken by Azerbaijan.
Some Final Pictures
The Armenia/Artsakh border. These flags likely aren’t here anymore.
Me in front of the statue, just to prove I was there.
A picture our group took at a military base we visited; one of the areas we got to go to that normal tourists wouldn’t. We also got to see the ruins of the city of Aghdam, destroyed during the war, and were even taken into a border trench. This was a relatively safe stretch of the border. But I can say I have been to an active warzone.
A picture of me wandering the area around Gandzasar. When I see these pictures again, it takes me back to my wanderings in Artsakh...which are now only a memory. I was there once, and a part of me will be there always.
