Angel Luis Colón

A Yoko That Deserves Some Love

September 3rd, 2013

I’m not even going to go to that place and toss out a few easy Yoko Ono questions.

I can seriously think of about 9 off the top of my head too.

Anyway, this is actually about a true musical genius by the name of Yoko Kanno.

Seriously, click here, she’s a fucking genius.

Her works have been heavily featured in Japanese animation and video games, but she also works with various acts. She doesn’t sing, only composes and arranges – but her ear and method are distinct while paying homage to her influences.

Since I feel not many people have been exposed to this lady’s awesomeness, I’ve decided to toss out few of my favorite pieces.

1. TANK! – Cowboy Bebop

Forget the unbelievable beauty of the animation, this might be the best damn theme song to ANYTHING. It captures the mood and energy of the show and sets a tone that keeps you engaged long after you’ve heard it.

Utterly unforgettable.

2) Inner Universe – Ghost in The Shell: Standalone Complex

I can’t identify many electronic tracks that I would call haunting, but the arrangement and Origa’s vocals are phenomenal.

3) Piano Black – Cowboy Bebop

Perfection. No other words. Well, maybe a few. I’m an utter sucker for great piano work and while this piece is repetitive, it’s a great earworm and great for a run.

4) Face On – Wolf’s Rain

Epic as all hell and I DESPISED this show. The strings are fucking beautiful, hell, everything about this piece is beautiful.

Google Yokoa Kanno and check out some of her other pieces if you get the chance. It’s an opportunity to hear something different and give some love to a female musician that doesn’t need to stick her tongue out like a stroke victim and act like an 11 year-old pretending to be a big girl for attention.

Be Easy.

-A
I was totally dark and stuff…

August 30th, 2013

So I’m minding my own business; multitasking and listening to some Pandora when it drops this on me:

Followed by this:

My “goth” phase lasted maybe 2 years at most, but I will say some of my fondest memories were going to The Bank (Google it) on a Friday or Saturday night (hopefully the fake ID would work) dressed like a Cure reject and harrassing the DJs to play my favorite tracks. Some nights I even danced!

As most of my teenage endeavors to forge a predetermined identity for myself, this was all because of a girl or multiple girls…to be honest, it was probably multiple girls.

Luckily, my time dressed in obscure t-shirts and wearing nail polish exposed me to some fantastic music from the Cruxshadows, The Cocteu Twins, Apoptygma Berzerk, The Virgin Prunes, Alien Sex Fiend, The KIlling Joke, Christian Death, Wolfsheim and London After Midnight.

I can keep going, but I’ve got other things to do.

Anyway, if you’ve never listened to Dark Wave, Shoegazer, or Industrial music, give some of those bands a shot. Obviously, music from a niche like this is never everyone’s cup of tea, but I think if you can pull away from the whole “scene” you find some phenomenal talent and some really influential stuff.

Or you might even start rocking Legendary Pink Dots t-shirts and wearing black eyeliner all the time. Your mileage may vary.

– Be easy
Cliche, cliche, cliche

August 27th, 2013

I’m finding that as I increase my writing output that almost every single idea I have is rooted in what I’ve been exposed to via the arts.

And what I’ve been exposed to is firmly rooted in what those artists were exposed to and on and on and on and on…

You get the point, right?

Now, I’m not one to say that originality in writing, art film or music is long dead – far from it, actually, but is it so wrong to appreciate a person’s creative output even if it’s firmly entrenched in the hero’s journey or a specific “style”?

Why do we, as critics of pop culture and art, bemoan the cliche – the overused tropes on a basis so regular that it actually jumps headfirst into an empty pool and becomes exactly what we claim to hate?

In the meantime we drop millions of dollars on sequels and remakes, only to complain and moan right after.

Have we become a civilization with so much luxury that complaining or relishing in schadenfreude is all we have to entertain us now?

I’ll admit that as I write my novel and sketch out plans for other projects; I spot a plot point or two that I know I’ve lifted from my favorite authors or movies. If so, shouldn’t I at least be mindful of that and then try to give the material my own spin? Hell, if I’m confident enough of my own voice, then I shouldn’t have to worry about coming off as cliche.

Ah well, I’m procrastinating on other items and made an excuse to blog again for the first time in three months.

At least something was accomplished today.
We maraude for ears…

May 30th, 2013

I’m a month off from being 33 and while there’s plenty of weird new thirty-something baggage I have to deal with; I’m finding it easier to think back on the past without being sad about the time that’s past.

One of the things I’ve found myself thinking about are those tiny little “sparks” the moments in our lives where something made so much sense; it was absolutely a part of you-a permanent fixture of who you are and who you will be. Those sparks are everywhere;
our interactions with people, a piece of art we saw at a gallery, hell, it could be an argument you had with a friend.

20 years ago I discovered music, and that was my spark.

I don’t think I have to explain myself completely. We all have that moment where the music we listened to stopped being just the background of moments. That single moment where you stopped and actually listened to what was coming out of the speakers or headphones.

I can cite dozens of albums that cracked my skull open in 1993; The Broken EP, Enter the WuTang, Siamese Dream, In Utero, Vs., seriously, Google “albums released in 1993” and you will find a list highlighting what I consider to be the definitive year of the decade for all genres. It’s a phenomenal group of work.

There’s a single album that is still on my permanent playlist.

Just click here. You will not regret it.

November 9th, 1993 is officially the day hip hop died in my eyes. A lot of folks will balk at that, but I’m not being negative. Midnight Marauders was the album that nailed it. A Tribe Called Quest managed to release an album that was not only fit for general consumption, but was so full of soul and meaning – so purely hip hop, that it will never be outdone. There have been hundreds of good albums released since then, but this right here is the masterpiece.

I’ll put it in perspective. A lot of folks compare Tribe’s album before this, The Low End Theory, to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, which is pretty valid. I think of Midnight Marauders as hip hop’s Revolver, an almost perfect album.

So anyway, this was an important work of art to me. Since that November, I can say that I went through three cassettes and two CDs of this album alone; all lost from overuse.

Now, I at least have it all on digital and still listen to every single track of this album with a smile on my face.

I know every measure, every lyric – it’s been tattooed to my brain.

Thanks to Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammed, and sometimes Jarobi. I’ll continue listening for another 20 years.

Be easy, folks.
The Worst Movie Endings Part 1

May 24th, 2013
How many times have you said, “It was pretty good, until the end where…” coming out of a movie?

The past few years, not only have I found myself saying that a lot more often, but I’ve found myself in one too many situations where the ending of a flick has utterly ruined a movie I was enjoying not ten minutes before it all went to hell.

So without rambling on and on, I’ve decided to focus on a few movies that I feel utterly destroyed all the good will built by solid starts with unbelievably terrible endings.

I’ll be doing two or three of these a week, seeing as my rambling will require me to focus one movie at a time.

Needless to say: SPOILERS.

Prometheus

Prometheus was supposed to be the answer to all my movie nerd prayers.This was supposed to be my jam in 2012.

Forget the ties to Alien; I didn’t give a damn about that. We were getting Ridley fucking Scott back on the Sci-Fi wagon! This was it, we were finally going to have something imaginative and intelligent. There were promises of clever ties to the original Alien, a departure from the standard prequel bullshit we always get.

Full disclosure: I’m a rabid Blade Runner and Alien fanboy. I don’t care how many issues a person can find with those movies, I love them deeply and make it a yearly ritual to watch both and simply bask in their glow. To hear that the director of both would come back to the world of Alien and provide a new, interesting story focused on a single moment of that film had me foaming at the mouth.

Dude, we were going to get an answer to this thing! There’s no way you can fuck up an explanation for something this weird!

The trailers amped me up. The cast seemed to be on point. Those viral videos with Guy Pierce being all Guy Pierce about robots and space. I was literally willing to have a thousand of Sir Ridley’s chest babies. I walked into the theater with the expectation that sure, maybe the quality won’t redefine my life but that didn’t matter; I was getting hard Sci-Fi for the first time in nearly a decade or more!

So let’s jump ahead to movie. The first two acts have their flaws, but I forgave them. I even looked past the geologist and biologist acting like two McDonald’s employees thrown in a cave. It was all going to be ok, Michael Fassbender was being amazing, and everytime I started doubting myself, he or Idris Elba popped up and reminded me that a cast this cool-a cast this classy; couldn’t be in the wrong.

Oh look, an alien vagina faced cobra! How can you not put your face up to it?

I even dealt with the wacky caesarian scene. For one; being awake during surgery is a fear of mine, so it made me squirm like crazy to watch it. Also, it was actually an interesting twist on the chestburster concept, so I gave them a little credit for thinking outside the box.

That was a mistake.

From the moment the caesarian is over we get:
1. A woman who has just gone through surgery fucking sprinting on the surface of alien planet while wearing a cumbersome spacesuit.
2. They somehow completely screw the pooch on a full answer to the space jockeys. Really? They’re god, but for some reason they want to kill all of us?
3. An inexplicably angry alien that it supposed to be our creator, but does little more than act like a cross between Michael Myers, The Hulk and one of the juice-heads from my gym.
4. Charlize Theron running away from a falling spaceship; and not once thinking to run to her left or right; where she would more easily avoid the falling object that was longer than it was wide.
5. That caesarian baby monster (torn from our main character’s body at about the size of a premature baby) somehow grew to the size of an elephant and grows a dozen penises from it’s vagina-head. This thing goes on to fight the pale, roided up frenchman (those dudes looked french to me, is that racist?) and face-hugs his ass.
6. Our heroine jets off in a spaceship by herself, that she has no idea how to use with the robot that was just trying to get her killed to go and ask the rest of Frenchy’s friends why they’re so mean.
This is all pretty stupid, and I knew this, but I still gave a little love to the movie. Sure, none of it made sense, but maybe what they were setting up would pay off in a big way.

That’s when Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof read my mind, looked at each other and threw me against the proverbial pinball machine (if you get, you get it) and gave me this:

41 seconds to ruin an entire movie. 41 seconds to say “fuck you” to fans new and old. I’ve never had a movie do this to me before; and I spent money to see the prequels, Crystal Skull AND Superman Returns.

Now maybe you think I’m being harsh. Maybe you think I should have hated Prometheus as soon as one of those pale french dudes got half-naked and fell into a waterfall to make human happen. In hindsight, you’d be right. Prometheus was a terrible film from the start, but I let hype and an open mind allow me to embrace it, only for it to clue me in on it’s awfulness at the very last minute with a cheap, shitty link to the original Alien films.

I remember walking out of the theater feeling empty, finally understanding what so many felt walking out of Phantom Menace (a terrible film, but that lightsaber fight at the end was completely distracting and “fucking awesome” when I was 18/19).

Fuck Prometheus.

Until next time, where I’ll be discussing, you guessed it: Robocop 3…I’m not kidding.


Dude, we were going to get an answer to this thing! There’s no way you can fuck up an explanation for something this weird!

A Yoko That Deserves Some Love

I was totally dark and stuff…

Cliche, cliche, cliche

We maraude for ears…

The Worst Movie Endings Part 1