I filled out one of those chain mail copy-paste lists on Facebook earlier today. You know the ones, they’ve been passed around since the days of MySpace, and probably even earlier. This one was about movies you love and hate.
If you can’t read that:
MOVIE I HATE: 102 Dalmations (I’ve blocked most of it out, but it was awful)
MOVIE I THINK IS OVERRATED: Any Marvel movie. I’m not a fan of the superhero genre outside of maybe Batman, but even then the villains are what interest me.
MOVIE I THINK IS UNDERAPPRECIATED: Return to Oz
MOVIE I LOVE: Masque of the Red Death
MOVIE I CAN WATCH OVER & OVER: The Dark Crystal
MOVIE THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH MOVIES: Jurassic Park
MOVIE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: They Live. I hated advertising and capitalism before watching it too, but I really don’t look at the world the same way after watching that. It pushed me all the way left politically.
MOVIE THAT SURPRISED ME: Cats Don’t Dance. It had such brilliant animation and production values, and yet it is forgotten.
GUILTY PLEASURE: Once Upon a Forest. When you read into the production of the film it’s quite sad, the executives forced them to tone it down and cut a bunch of scenes. It even had a much better title originally, The Endangered. If I come out and say I’m a fan of Once Upon a Forest everyone who never saw it is going to assume it’s some sappy kids movie. Bah.
MOVIE I SHOULD HAVE SEEN BY NOW BUT HAVEN'T: Citizen Kane
MOVIE TRILOGY MASTERPIECE: Lord of the Rings
MOVIE MASTERPIECE: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times
I love that this list starts with “hate”. You don’t see that a lot. These things are probably secretly some data-mining operation, I know. But whatever, the corporations and FBI probably already know everything about me, it’s a lost cause trying to preserve my privacy. Anyway, my good friend Kris Silva did one about books, and now I want to do one about books and music. Then I remembered I have a blog for this sort of thing.
As for the original list; I’m probably not the biggest movie buff, but I do like watching classic and even silent films, which I don’t think a lot of people watch anymore. I also love animated films, particularly traditionally animated ones. And I tend to hate formulaic cash-cow movies, like most movies within the superhero genre, and most modern Disney movies (the best Disney movies are the ones that bombed at the box office for some reason; I’m sure there’s some conspiracy behind this). Capitalism so does not breed innovation, the Hollywood film industry has become so profit-driven that they don’t take any risks. Their plots are not written by actual writers but constructed by a committee looking at charts and graphs. I can’t remember the last time I was excited to see a newly released movie at the movie theater.
Anyway! I’m going to do more of these lists, even though I should be doing something more productive with my time. Like my art. Don’t worry, tomorrow’s page of Alcatraz High is like 99% finished. Here’s the one for books. By the way, I’m including graphic novels, because those are books too. Now I have like tons of books, that I don’t even have the time to read anymore now that I’m a parent and a very underpaid, overlooked webcomic artist. I mean, I could have more time to read them if I wasn’t playing video games, watching TV, scrolling Facebook and Reddit, and writing meaningless blogs. It’s a matter of priority I guess. Writing that makes me want to shift my priorities a bit.
Books
BOOK I HATE: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I got tormented by William Faulkner in my creative writing Masters program. So incomprehensible and boring.
BOOK I THINK IS OVERRATED: Harry fuckin’ Potter. Such derivative trash, written by a trash author.
BOOK I THINK IS UNDERAPPRECIATED: Any Oz book that isn’t the first book. And especially any book after the sixth one, as most adaptations that do touch the sequels stop there. But not the Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, a lot of those deserve their obscurity.
BOOK I LOVE: The Crow by James O’Barr. The movie is great, but the comic is even better. It’s a gothy revenge story. The art is amazing. You can tell it influenced my art of course.
BOOK I CAN READ OVER & OVER: The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain. It is a very dark, nihilistic book. But the character Satan has such insight into the human condition, the hypocrisy of organized religion, and indeed existence itself. That rant in the last chapter. Check it out.
Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who
151mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!BOOK THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH READING: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. I know, same as my answer for movies, but this was the first adult novel I ever read, at age ten, and I was just absorbed by it. That book made me a writer.
BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: Under Stalin’s Sun by my grandfather, Suren Oganessian the First. I first read the book in my early teens, at a time in my life where I felt like I had no identity, no pride, I was directionless. But this great man who I am named after survived so much. It gave me an identity. His story about how he escaped a Siberian gulag has helped motivate me all my life.
BOOK THAT SURPRISED ME: I guess The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum. When I decided “eh what the hell, let’s read all the Oz books on Project Gutenberg” while I was stuck at that call center job, I wasn’t expecting it to be so addicting. I mean I can’t say it’s high literature, I know that, but it was good character writing. Anyway, it surprised me by being good. And now Oz books are like the only books I read anymore.
GUILTY PLEASURE (BOOK): Huh I accidentally skipped this one but came back to it when I got to the guilty pleasure for music. A book that’s a guilty pleasure? I don’t know. Hey, Once Upon a Forest had a novelization, that I bought in my 20s because for some reason I had access to disposable income. I couldn’t imagine doing that today. Like my kid and I need to eat. Buuut, it probably sounds like I’m shitting on Once Upon a Forest. I’m so ashamed, ohh noo, people on the internet will know I like something! If I was that ashamed I wouldn’t even mention it here.
BOOK I SHOULD HAVE READ BY NOW BUT HAVEN'T: I’ve been neglecting the L. Frank Baum books that aren’t Oz books. The only one I read was The Sea Fairies.
BOOK SERIES MASTERPIECE: Lord of the Rings. Because I’m talking about Oz too much and I want to make it seem like I read other books too, so people will think I’m intelligent. That’s what these Facebook lists really are, for showing off to people on your friends list.Well I did slog through those books in High School when the movies were popular. There’s a good story but it’s buried under these details that don’t need to be in there, pages and pages of dry, unnecessary world building.That’s just JRR Tolkien’s writing style. But it’s still a masterpiece because no one before him had ever done something like that before, as extensively. Yeah, Oz pioneered world building as a concept but Tolkien is the example every fantasy writer follows at least to some degree, whether directly or indirectly.
BOOK MASTERPIECE: Oooookay, now I have to think of a masterpiece with no sequels. Well you know what, I really like this book I have, Armenian Legends and Poems by Zabelle Boyajian. It was written in 1916 and is public domain, but it has a lot of my favorite Armenian poets, like Bedros Tourian, Hovhannes Tumanian, Raffi, Sayat Nova, a bunch of others. You can read it online. That was how I first read it, but I ordered a hard copy book of it back in Grad School.
Okay, time for music. This time I’ll replace “MOVIE” with “BAND”, or “ALBUM”. Actually this might be trickier than the BOOK one was. I hate all-caps don’t you? But I guess that’s how the copy pasta goes. Who was the one who wrote it I wonder? Some spy for the CIA or something. Well write normally! My touchscreen keyboard doesn’t appear to have Caps Lock. Maybe I’m supposed to fiddle with the arrow that shifts between upper and lower case letters. Ohhh I have some trivia! Did you know that “lower case” and “upper case” comes from the old printing machines? They would keep the letters of the typeset in cases. Big ones in the upper case, small letters in the lower case. I learned that when I worked at the Cracker Country museum on the Florida State Fairgrounds. Hey let me dig up that blog I wrote about it. Here it is. From three years ago! Time flies. I will have to reread it later.
Ohhhh what was I typing about again? Oh yeah! Music.
Music
BAND I HATE: Kid Rock. First I thought of Creed, then I thought wait no, Limp Bizkit is even worse than Creed, and then I thought of the worst band/artist of all that used to get played on rock radio stations in the late 90s. Screw that wannabe redneck. He’s not even a real redneck, he was born rich and pretends like he grew up in the trailer parks or something. Stupid Trump worshiper. And his music is just Gods awful. “Play with your balls and pick your butt, diggydiggydiggy pick a boogie and then hawk a loogie!”
BAND I THINK IS OVERRATED: I think it’s The Beatles. I’ve just never liked them. I know they were influential and stuff.
BAND I THINK IS UNDERAPPRECIATED: The entire goth genre is underappreciated. And apparently that’s actually supposed to be two words, and the CIA agent who wrote this is illiterate. But within the goth genre, you still have bands that receive way more attention than others. Like the DJs that do goth radio shows and YouTube playlists always focus on bands from North America and Western Europe. You don’t get to hear bands from South America or anywhere east of Germany unless you go out and dig for them yourself, or find a really cool YouTube channel that uploads stuff like that. I am going to be a proud Armenian and give the title to Jrimurmur. They’re like the Armenian Lebanon Hanover. Listen to them.
BAND I LOVE: Lots of bands, obviously. Let’s go with Das Ich, that’s the band I’m in the mood to say right now. That’s the band that got me into goth music. When I found their CD in the metal section at Rasputin Records, where it shouldn’t have been.
BAND I CAN LISTEN TO OVER & OVER: Lately, it’s kind of a tie between Nirvana and Alice in Chains. Hey, you can be goth and listen to other genres too you know. But yeah, I always have to go through and listen to every single live performance, demo and bootleg I can find of these bands. Rarely a day goes by where I don’t hear something from either band.
BAND THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH MUSIC: We have to go wayyyy back to answer this question. Back to my toddler years in the 1980s. My mom would watch MTV all the time back then, and I would listen to all sorts of music. Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” comes to mind. I used to love watching that stop motion music video to it. I guess it was that. Then you had Guns n Roses and Aerosmith very early on too. Too bad I know what an asshole Axl Rose is now.
BAND THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: Das Ich certainly did, but it was preceded by Kraftwerk. I first heard Kraftwerk when I was 12, and it tuned me into electronic and German music. It set me off on a journey that would eventually lead me to goth after several detours.
BAND THAT SURPRISED ME: Uhhhh hmm. That’s a tricky one. You know, that scream at the beginning of “Them Bones” by Alice in Chains still gets me sometimes, like if I accidentally have the volume up too high. “AAAH!!!”
GUILTY PLEASURE: Well you know Once Upon a Forest had a soundtrack - No, no, I’m not going to pick on Once Upon a Forest again. What else can I think of?
“I can tell time by the moooooon” no no stop it.
I will say though that I hate that gospel song the dumb birds sing in the movie. I always skip that part of the movie. Don’t think I’m into that.
BAND I SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO BY NOW BUT HAVEN'T: Ummm, I mean listening to a band is pretty easy. What should I have listened to? What could be such a chore to listen to that I won’t just go on YouTube and search the band, and listen through my bluetooth headphones for one minute? Maybe it should be album. Hmmm. Oh, okay. Well here it is. In the 90s there was this kinda industrial band called The Prodigy, had two hits, “Firestarter” and “Breathe”, and those are still the only two songs I have ever heard from them. I need to listen to their other music. I would probably like it. They sound like they could have been influenced by Das Ich, or another electro goth band.
ALBUM MASTERPIECE: I’m going to ignore the trilogy one for music. Okay, I want to pick an album that is a masterpiece from start to finish, has no songs I would ever skip. In Times Before the Light by Covenant. Or “The Kovenant” if you will. Followed closely by their second album Nexus Polaris. Covenant is my favorite metal band by far. Too bad they disappeared in 2003. They said they were going to release a new album and that they were done recording it, and I’m still waiting for it. It’s been 20 years since their last album. The lead singer got bullied on his blog by a few metalheads because he was putting synths in his music. So what? You’re just going to quit because of that? What a disservice to the fans that did like your later albums. I love you guys, but there’s absolutely no excuse not to release that last album you said you were done with back in like 2004 or something after all these years. I don’t really know the full story of what happened I guess. It sucks though. Their music was so good. They didn’t officially break up, they just disappeared. Did a few concerts here and there since then, rereleased their first and second albums a couple times, but that’s it. At least give us that new album, then you can go back to the abyss if you want.
Well, I’m done ranting. Yaaaaay. My comic page is mostly finished at least, so I was able to waste time writing this while chilling in my bedroom. I guess I will go back downstairs and help Deborah with Jareth. Then she can have a break if she wants. We take shifts in parenting.
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