2022 Entertainment Roundup

It’s time once again to write a year-end round up for my own amusement.  Pardon me if I’m not scoring high on the excitement meter because I’m finding it difficult to be excited about anything lately.  The old They Might Be Giants lyric keeps going through my head: “Now it’s over, I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want / Or I’m still alive and there’s nothing I want to do.”  Them TMBG boys used to make some great albums…  Speaking of “used to”, two highly-cherished bands released albums in 2022 after (in one case) decades of silence and both were just kind of “meh”.  If my temperament was better then I might have found these albums as enjoyable as many others seem to have found them. 

One surprising new band that blew my socks of is Frost… in 2006.  Their Milliontown album was phenomenal, and their follow-up was almost as good.  Eight years later they released a disappointing collection of songs and in 2022, five years later, they released Day And Age.  I didn’t have high hopes and I wasn’t disappointed in my lack of enthusiasm.  It was a decent album but I haven’t found myself wanting to listen to it since it was released, meaning my score of 7 is probably spot on.

But five years between album releases ain’t nuthin!  How about fourteen?  Can it really have been fourteen years since King’s X released XV?  While this band’s first five albums rank them as one of my favorite bands of all time, everything after 1994’s Dogman have been inconsistent.  Some I liked, some grew on me, some don’t get much play.  It was not with much anticipation that I listened to Three Sides of One and it’s… decent.  Right now I have it at an 8 and it’s still in my vehicle, hoping that it will grow on me.

But fourteen years between album releases ain’t nuthin!  How about THIRTY ONE?!?!?  Yes, the original Chagall Guevara album came out in 1991 and I still listen to it now and then.  I tempered my hopes and backed their Kickstarted and waited.  And waited.  And so on.  Eventually the album came out and… well?  Two songs had been released before during the previous decades (and one of these was a cover), leaving a mere seven original songs.  Some of these are quite strong, but I can’t help feeling like I got the short end of the stick.  It gets a 7, being docked one point for being a glorified EP.

What else is there to complain about?  Hmmm… the much hyped Troika is pretty good (7) but not deserving of all the gushing people heaped on it.  I very much enjoyed stumbling upon Prehensile Tales by Pattern Seeking Animals (8), which is a variation of late-era Spock’s Beard with solid songwriting.  I’m looking forward to investigating their other two albums.  I finally listened to the first Knifeworld album (8) and found it unusual and interesting.  Shades by Ty Tabor (7.5) was nice, a bit better than his last album, to my ears at least. 

I also caught up on some older albums.  I tried Frosting on the Beater by The Posies a few years back and nothing happened.  Fortunately I tried again and found most of the songs thoroughly enjoyable, a solid 9!  Sometimes it’s not the music but where you are in life.  All Right Here by Sara Groves was also highly enjoyable, but the other two early albums of hers I listened to in 2022 were not nearly as satisfying.

And then there’s Matt Bisonette.  He’s currently a touring bass player for some big, big names (in the 70s) but in his past he’s played in Jughead and Mustard Seeds, two Christian-leaning bands I’ve dearly loved.  So I was very glad to find that Spot (7) and Raising Lazarus (9) fall very much in their style of upbeat, positive, carefree, distorti-power pop and that he is, in fact, a practicing Christian… practicing more than in just empty words.  He has quite a few more solo albums which I’ll explore over the next year or two.

 

In my reading life 2023 was the year of Clifford Simak.  I read 14 novels and 9 non-fiction books (for a whopping total of 23, the same number that I read in 2022, but far less than my peak of 50 in 2007).  Half of the novels were my Simak.

Lemma tell ya… when this guy is at his A game he comes up with some imaginative stuff!  His book City is considered a sci-fi classic, and for good reason.  It is a bittersweet, timeless story of a world that’s gone to the dogs.  Literally.  Mankind bred dogs to be able to talk and created self-replicating robotic arms for them before slipping off to Saturn and other dimensions, leaving dogs to argue if this ancient myth of “mankind” is actually based on reality.

Goblin Station was a wacky comic book, with a well-read cave man, the ghost of William Shakespeare, maybe a wolfman?  It was pretty madcap, but not zany.  But even better was another classic, the lonely The Way Station (I’ll be reading that one again) and Ring Around The Sun, which was an early novel based on Simak’s themes of alternate dimensions and the economy.  Yes, the economy.  I should also add that most of his writings have rural settings.  Based on a few pages in Ring Around the Sun I’m pretty sure Simak was a fellow INFJ.  So wonderfully unique… so uniquely unable to ever fit in with 99.99% of the worlds population. 

In the early summer I enjoyed Amish Zombies from Space by Kerry Nietz, the sequel to Amish Vampires in Space.  He kept it PG, even with the violence, like a good Christian author.  I’ve been waiting for 2023 to read the final book in the series: Amish Werewolves of Space (what? You were expecting Amish garden gnomes?)

I received the Mike Lindell autobiography What Are The Odds as a gag gift from my kids but I like reading autobiographies so the jokes on them.  It was a great read… about as fun as it gets these days.  I re-read Perelandra by C.S. Lewis after a three+ decade break.  Some people love this book but not me.  The first 2/3 of the book is fairly decent but the last third has no action of any kid and is pretty much a long allegory with few guideposts to help the reader along.  The Jewish Gospel of John by Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg was an excellent interpretation of this meaty gospel, postulation that its original audience was the Samaritans, which would explain many of the “problems” people have had with it over the centuries.

I guess my 2022 reading time was pretty enjoyable… another thing to be thankful for!

 

 

Book Review - Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!: My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group by Dennis Dunaway

While there have been other Alice Cooper Band biographies (including Alice’s own Me, Alice and No More Mr. Nice Guy by guitarist/songwriter Michael Bruce) I would state that Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!: My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group is the definitive biography. It is, after all, written by the bassist of the group, Dennis Dunaway (with Chris Hodenfield) and we all know that bassists are often methodical beasts. Plus he had a journal and many letters written during this time period. In a friendly way, Dennis points out that Alice the man is prone to exaggeration and embellishment and during their heyday if a rumor sprouted up somewhere it was encouraged. For instance the chicken incident. Dennis notes that the band itself brought the chicken and you can see in some film of the event where Alice pulls the chicken from the bag. However it was never the bands intent that the chicken be killed by the audience, though when it happened the controversy was free press.

Dennis also clarifies the origin of many of the concepts and themes that made the band famous, usually attributing them to himself or his wife, who made the bands outlandish clothing on no budget overnight. Being the quiet fellow and thinking that it was a band effort, he usually did not speak up to defend his intellectual property, thinking that in the end it was all part of being in a band. Bass players are often like that. But he also gives mountains of credit where it is due, not only to the individual members of the band but also to their innovative lighting guru, management and roadies. There’s also the matter of how to divide writing credits when one is in a band kicking around ideas. As an example he quoted the original poetry that was morphed by the band into the song “Desperado.” No writing credit for Dennis on that one but there would be no “Desperado” without his initial page of inspiration. It’s refreshing that there’s no bitterness or “I told you so” in his tone, just a telling of how things happened. There are other clarifications throughout the book, though I’ll leave those for the reader to discover*.

Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! is highly recommended. Even though I had heard most of these stories before, from multiple sources, it was nice to hear them again from a more objective viewpoint. As a music junkie it would have been nice to read more stories behind the creation of every album. Yes, I understand that the albums were cranked out about every six months under a dizzying whirlwind of touring and drugs and partying but still... I mean, the School’s Out album has some amazing bass lines on it (amazing songs, too) but the only song Dennis wrote about is the title track. I suppose you can’t always get what you want. Oh wait, that’s another band.

* But I have to say that Dennis puts to rest the idea that Bob Ezrin taught the band to play their instruments. Bob helped tighten their songwriting arrangements but they band was already very adept, as the two Zappa-label albums will attest.

The Bestest Books I Read in 2014

Crikey! Has it really been over two months since I posted? Like it matters. But for some reason I feel like writing and so here goes...

The Bestest Books I Read in 2014

What? No music best of? Maybe later, tater. According to my dorky database, I read a total of 33 books in 2014, down from 37 in the two years previous. 2007 was a banner year at 53 with 51 in both 2008 and 2009. In 2003 I only read eight books, or rather I started the database in 2004 and had to recall what I read and we all know how bad my memory is. Who knows what gems I forgot to catalog? Now turning to our ten day forecast...

I just loves me to read. And write. There's no money in writing, or reading, so I can't support a family that way and instead sit in a windowless office staring at a monitor for eight hours a day. Not straight, mind you, 'cause I share an office with a guy who feeds every two hours on nuts and chips and cups full of ice ("That cup isn't going to magically refill there, buddy, so you might as well throw it in the trash.") Then my misophonia kicks in and I take a walk. That's probably good 'cause nine out of ten taxidermists say that sitting too long causes hemorrhoids.

My wife loves to read but rarely gets to. I read almost exclusively during my lunch break because at home I serve as a jungle gym where small children climb on me. I like being a jungle gym but it's easy to lose your place on the page when you're trying to "Daddy, look at this" every minute or so. My two older daughters love to read as well, which I really like. Except when they read two or more full novels in a day. That's when you know you have a problem.

Of the books I read this past year, eighteen were non-fiction and fifteen were fiction (again, from the database). That's a decent balance, methinks. Reading fiction is a much needed mental escape, especially if you don't watch much TV or movies, but like TV and movies, too much fiction and you should probably start looking into what you are trying to avoid. I should probably read more fiction, though, 'cause life is hard. Sometimes a month or so goes by and I'm finding myself to be really grouchy or irritable and I realize that I haven't read a novel in a while. It's good medicine, mate.

But non-fiction rocks as well. It's the best kind of continuing education. Read ten novels and you've been entertained but not really much better off (unless they are well researched historical novels). Read ten non-fiction books and suddenly you're ready for Jeopardy. Well, perhaps not but at least you've hopefully challenged your thinking a bit.

Three books top my 2014 non-fiction reading list, all of which can cause a shift to one's thinking. The first is Seven Experiments That Could Change The World by Rupert Sheldrake. These are experiments that nearly any one can do that seem to turn accepted knowledge on it's head. You know, those things that we were taught in school that everyone takes for granted. For instance, how do homing pigeons home? A number of theories have been put forth over the years but despite some scientists saying that know, they really don't have experimental, repeatable proof of any theory. Another interesting tidbit is that constants such as the speed of light or the force of gravity are not constant. For instance, during the almost century that we've been able to measure the speed of light it has changed. Not gotten more accurate, but actually changed. For instance, it was measurably slower during the 1930s and 1940s by almost every measurement around the globe. Sheldrake also fills us in on how scientists treat data, throwing out measurements that are outside of what they expect, calling them errors, instead of looking into why the measurement is not what they expect.
The other two books are by L.A. Marzulli. On The Trail of the Nephilim is packed with photographs of impressive architectural stonework in South America and elsewhere, postulating that these engineering marvels (many of which we still cannot replicate) were constructed by super-intelligent ancient man. Or ancient giants (nephilim) and then goes on to give archeological proof. The other book, Cosmic Chess Match explains that age old question of how a loving God could tell Isreal to wipe out entire groups of people in the Old Testament. In a nutshell, in Genesis God tells Satan that Eve's seed would crush his head and so Satan begins to try to corrupt Eve's seed. Hence the giants in Genesis 6 and the need for the flood to cleanse the earth of corrupted DNA. Also hence the mixed-race genetic corruption of groups of people that Israel had to destroy (and notice, God didn't tell them to wipe out every city in the promised land) and the report from Joshua and Caleb that they appeared as grasshoppers compared to the current occupants. I and others would also postulate that the coming trans-humanism (altering our DNA and that of animals and food) is yet another attempt at corrupting the "good" that God has made. It's pretty freaky stuff but Marzulli has things well documented and logically presented.

As far as fiction, an early enjoyable read was Flight of the Shadows by Sigmund Brouwer. He's married to a Christian music artist and while there was a strong current of morality in this book, it would fail the "Chistianese" test of most bookstores. It was also a sequel of which I was unaware. Elysium by Keith Robinson was a smash and a blast, being the best apologetic-science-fiction that I've read yet. Published in 2013, I'm hoping that Robinson is hard at work on the next book in the series. Another good one is The Resurrection by Mike Duran. Part thriller, part character study, this book focuses on a small town that experiences a resurrection of a boy and how this affects people, from the lady who laid a hand on the boy in his casket before he rose, to her family, friends and pastor, to the people in the town who think she has a gift from God. Good stuff, there. Also in the "Christian-Thriller" genre, and quite possibly the best book I read all year, is 3 Gates of the Dead by Indiana's own Jonathon Ryan. Fast-paced, gritty and faith-based, this one takes place in Ohio and incorporates the occult and nephilim-built mounds. Impeccably written but probably not one you'll find on the shelves of your local Family Bookstore as there is some language (though The Resurrection has no such issues). The sequel is due out this spring and my bank account is itching.

While I didn't intentionally seek out Christian books, they certainly do seem to top my list. One that earned a solid ten is by none other than Donald Westlake. What I Tell You Three Times Is False is the third book written under the pen name of Sam Holt. Apparently Westlake wanted to know if his books sold because of his name or if they were actually good and so he started yet another pen name. He was outed after the second book and decided to just have fun with the whole concept and in the process wrote a book that is an immensely enjoyable read. I write more of this book here.

Book Review - What I Tell You Three Times Is False - Donald Westlake

Only Donald Westlake could write a deconstructionist novel that contains a discussion on deconstructionism. He not only gets away with this blatant disregard for form but does so in such a casual as to make it look easy. The man is a genius.

If you’re like me, you have (or had) no clue as to what “deconstructionism” is. According to Westlake, it’s the reason Westerns failed. It’s easier if I just quote:

“In each genre there are basic patterns, recurring scenes, stock characters. So with the deconstructionists the story is aware that it’s a story, the characters are aware that they’re characters with a function to fulfill, and the reader or the audience is constantly being reminded that this isn’t real life, this is a pattern, and it’s being presented in a particular way because of various artistic decisions and to further some sort of argument… In a western, the tough but honest foreman is aware that he’s an archetype, that Ward Bond is the basic figure he’s modeled after, and that the purpose he’s been created for is to represent that element of the story and not to live a regular life like a regular human being.”

Whew! That said, in What I Tell You Three Times Is False, written under the pen name of Samuel Holt, Westlake has the audacity to have Charlie Chan, Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes find themselves in a mystery. Or rather these characters come in the form of three actors who have portrayed these famous literary characters to the point that the public identifies one with the other. And the actors have begun to identify themselves with the character, or in some cases are fighting against it. These actors are presented with a classic murder mystery scenario: death in a locked room. They just happen to be on an island to film a public service ad for some charity but a tropical storm blew in just after they landed so they are trapped in a mansion, a kind of closed room in itself due to the inability to go outside in the fierce storm. One of them, or one of a small handful of guests and service people on the island, is the killer. And then another murder happens. And then another. One by one the list pares down as they wait for the storm to lift, hoping to solve the murders before they are next.

What I Tell You Three Times Is False was a total blast to read even though I’ve never read a Charlie Chan or Miss Marple book. Good clean murderous fun for the whole family!

Book Review - Testimony by Neal Morse

Neal Morse's autobiography, Testimony is a dandy of a book! It's a very quick read and I found it difficult to put down, taking whatever opportunity I had to sneak away for a few minutes. As the chapters are brief and the reading easy, I could often wolf down a chapter in only a handful of minutes.

And therein lies it's only problem. Yes, the book is a story of Neal's conversion and to that end it is very streamlined. However many, MANY times I found myself wanting more details surround the creation of various Spock's Beard and solo albums. There were no details on his relationships with Kevin Gilbert or Randy George or much of anyone. There were very few tour stories and entire years were passed over quickly. I can see the point in not bogging down the narrative with non-Testimony details but still...

However for all that, it's well worth the money (available here and many times it encouraged me to deepen my walk with Christ and to allow Him free reign over my life. Scary, indeed!

Book Review - The Year of Living Bibilically

My darling wife picked up the book The Year of Living Biblically because she thought I would like it. Does she know me, or what?

The concept is that the author is going to live a year of his life attempting to follow the Bible as literally as possible. He decides to spend eight months following the Old Testament and four months following the new, coinciding roughly to their respective lengths. The contents were quite entertaining though sometimes irksome.

For example:

Although he was always interested in "religion" his plan is to take this extreme approach to show how silly the Bible can be. He's a self-proclaimed liberal New Yorker (where even their conservatives are liberal by midwestern standards) who has a Jewish heritage and writes for Esquire, a men's magazine (or rather a magazine for adult males who haven't embraced what it is to be a man). So he does stuff like wear all white clothing, won't touch his wife after she menstruates, strictly observes the Sabbath and won't eat fruit if he isn't assured that it's taken from a tree more than four years old. The man was OCD to begin with so all these rules give him more room to flex this muscle.

He also tries not to lie, attempts prayer (which he likes but only really embraces a kind of "continual thankfulness"), and generally tries to be good. He also builds a tent in his apartment and sacrifices (almost) a chicken.

A.J. Jacobs spends 400 pages on the first eight months as he reconnects with his Jewish heritage. He visits many different expressions of this faith and attends a variety of ethnic festivals and celebrations. He is genuinely interested and it shows. Halfway through he wonders if he will come out of this year with a genuine faith, as did this reader, but so far he is clinging to his agnosticism.

He then spends a paltry 150 pages on his New Testament months and of these many pages are spent looking back to the Old Testament. His heart just isn't in it. Instead of the entertaining exploits of his Old Testament excusrions he interviews fringe groups like snake handlers, a group of openly gay yet otherwise conservative Christians, Red Letter Christians and attends Jerry Falwell's mega-church. Apparently even though he could travel to Tennessee to view snake handling and Isreal to visit his a cult-leader-like religious ex-relative he couldn't find time to visit a normal Christian church. Soon into his New Testament writings I lost hope that he would have faith and in the end he consigns himself to being a hopeful agnostic, more thankful for the blessings in his life than he was before but still without belief in God.

All in all, an entertaining read that was a bit rushed and incomplete. I give it four out of five fig leaves.

Book Report Time!

Hey kids, it's book report time!


In Sunday School we are working through the book Already Gone by Ken Ham and Britt Beemer, a book which looks at why twenty-somethings that are brought up in the church are not staying in the church. Ken Ham is a well known apologeticist who focuses on the scientific proofs for Creationism, even having a creation museum (check 'em out near Cinncinnati and an excellent web site with lots of facts about creationism and apologetics (http://www.answersingenesis.org.) Britt Beemer is the founder of America's Research Group, a business that specializes in market research.

Ham and Beemer wanted to find out more than THAT these twenty somethings were leaving... they wanted to find out WHY. So they put together a very detailed survey to help them discover these reasons, eventually having the survey completed by 1000 twenty-somethings (about evenly split between being under and over twenty-five). To focus their findings these thousand were all brought up in conservative churches, their assumption being that any findings would be amplified in those who attended liberal churches.

They found that most of these young adults started questioning what they were being taught in middle school and high school, whereas previously the common notion was that evil liberal college professors lured them away from their faith. Ham & co. further found that these adults were not properly equipped while in church with solid reasons why the Bible is to be taken as fact, thus making the Bible and church about FAITH but not about science, real life, or things they could touch. He even goes on to say that those who attended Sunday School as children and young adults were more prone to have erroneous thinking about creation, premarital sex, homosexual marriage, etc. than those who didn't attend.

While overall I've found the book to be intriguing it wasn't long before I flipped to the back to look at the actual survey questions and results. They are quite impressive but what is horribly, inexcusably missing is a control group. Where is a similar survey given to 1000 twenty-somethings who grew up in conservative churches that continue to attend? Would we find a similar percentage of those who stayed in church but didn't go to Sunday School also believe that premarital sex is wrong? Or before Ham states that Sunday School teachers, while good intentioned, have fallen down on the job shouldn't he first check with a control group to see if attendance in Sunday School has any correlation to staying in church? Further, his survey had over 25% stating they came from a Baptist background. Is 25% of the conservative Protestant population Baptist? If 40% of the population identifies itself as Baptists but only 25% don't continue as adults, well, that's better than 10% being Baptists with 25% not staying in the church. A control group would also show what percentage of Baptists continue in the church (just an example as the survey lists over twelve denominations) and if one denomination is unusually high then perhaps that would be a good place to start looking for answers.

Also high on the BIG QUESTION MARK HERE list is that 859 of the survey group came from public schools. Before Ham starts stating that twenty-somethings not staying in church is a problem across the board a control group would reveal if, for instance, home schoolers or those attending a Christian middle school have a higher percentage who stay in the church.

Not having a control group does not invalidate the findings but it does tend to weaken some of his arguments. For instance, I don't think the data proves that attending Sunday School causes more harm than good - there are too many other factors that a control group would have helped weed out. But then again, I'm not the head of some gigantic survey firm, though for the life of me (or some other stale phrase) I can't figure out why Beemer would not have insisted on a second control survey. Maybe it was a matter of money or maybe such a survey would have cast doubts on a couple of the "amazing revelations" chapters in the first half of the book, which would have only left the second half of the book which deals with a subject Ham covered more fully in earlier books (notably Why Won't They Listen? and Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World.) Beemer has a couple of paragraphs at the end of each chapter and especially in the one where Ham lays out the anti-Sunday School data I got the impression that Beemer was trying to distance himself in that he didn't directly comment on the contents of the chapter like he does in every other chapter.

While I'm only one chapter into Ham's solutions they seem common sense (or rather Biblical sense in that he quotes 1 Peter 3:15 "... Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have..." - teach these kids why the Bible in infallible and teach them that there is hard science behind creationism, that the evolutionary theories they are taught elsewhere have some serious logistical (and logical) problems. This will make the Bible relevant and concrete instead of just a book full of fairy-tale stories about angels and old people. Thumbing through the remaining chapters seems to show about sixty more pages of the same.

As I conclude my book report, I found the findings of the survey to be very interesting but not surprising. It has encouraged me to teach my children why we believe what we do and to help them understand that my faith is more than a "leap -o- faith" but rather something that was hammered out by researching creationism and Biblical claims, both Old and New Testament. Heck, it's even planted seed for me to teach an apologetics Sunday School class for the youth at church. Overall a decent, though incomplete, book.

I hereby officially declare June to be Donald Westlake Month

Ten years and one month ago I read my first novel by Donald Westlake, Castle In The Air. It was a convoluted, intelligent, humorous, intricate, stupifying tale of various groups attempting to steal an entire castle. While not revolutionary it was a very enjoyable and entertaining read so I immediately followed up with Smoke, a burgler turned invisible man premise. The summer went by and I dabbled with other authors, returning again in the fall to read God Save The Mark, a book written by Westlake in the late sixties. Hmmm... this guy is pretty good so I tried Adios, Scheherazade from the same period and found a favorite author.

Adios, Scheherazade is a semi-autobiographical first person story of a guy who is way past his deadline in writing his next smut book, causing him to be on the run from his editor, his angry wife (writing pulp is lucrative and they've gotten used to the money but he simply can't bring himself to do it anymore) and his brother in laws. Along the way he compulsively writes wherever he can, the most memorable being in a department store at their typewriter display where he tries to start a "smut" chapter that hilariously breaks down. And for book about "smut" you can be assured that Adios, Scheherazade is 100% smut free!

Since that time I've read a total of FIFTY Westlake books, both under his own name and under many of his pseudonymns: Richard Stark, Samuel Holt, Tucker Coe... I'm sure there are others. At last count I still have sixty-one novels left to read. Yes, the man has written over 110 novels. And they are amazingly consistent! Only one of the fifty I've read was mediocre. All the rest were very good to excellent. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, Stephen "retread" King!

Do yourself a favor and pick up a Westlake book at your nearest library. There are a number of novels about Dortmunder, a likable, non-violent thief whose ingenious plans always go wrong. Or if you're feeling darker go for anything written under the name Richard Stark - they're hardboiled crime novels that almost read themselves. Anything (other than Sacred Monster) with the Westlake name on it is sure to enrich your summer reading!