Christmas Music, Part I: Non-Traditional Holiday Songs

It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, I have been listening to plenty of Christmas tunes as of late, and I decided I should share them with the Internet. This is part one of my Christmas music write-up:

Patrick's Favorite Contemporary/Non-Traditional Holiday Songs! (after the jump)

Music Review: The Antlers - "Hospice"

Hospice is one of those odd things in the entertainment world that is simultaneously a positive and negative experience. When I first listened to it, my immediate reaction was to compare it to Requiem For A Dream. Exceedingly well-made, artistically, and fascinating to experience. At the same time, unbelievably draining on an emotional level. The kind of thing you need to be mentally prepared for before watching. In the immortal words of Marty McFly, "Heavy." Don't get me wrong, it's probably the best album I've heard in the past year, and The Antlers are well on their way to being my favorite band because of it. I'm just saying it's not an album one should enter lightly.

More after the jump!

Growing Up, and Friendship.

I just spent nine days in northern Michigan with my friend Mark and much of his extended family, and it was the most genuine fun I've had in a long, long time. However, the experience was bittersweet, because it sort of symbolizes the true end of my childhood. I graduated in May and decided to stay in Ann Arbor to live with friends and have fun in their company before everyone parted ways to begin "real life". I have spent the last three-point-five months doing some part-time work and some job searching, but mostly I was enjoying what time I had left. Now that I have returned from Up North, I must begin packing my Ann Arbor house and move back in with my parents until I find a proper job. And depending on what happens in the next year, I may not even be around for the next Up North trip with his family. Mark may not be, either. What if we just had the last pure, innocent, fun week of our lives before adulthood? (Probably not, but it's a thought.)

Turns out? Growing up is a tough thing.

In high school, I didn't have the kind of experience you see in popular culture. I wasn't going out drinking (never touched the stuff until college) or making out with my girlfriend (uh...ditto). I wasn't going to Warped Tour, or trying out for a school play, or forming a band. Mostly, I just hung out with my friends. Watching movies, playing video games, occasionally dressing up in wacky costumes - good times. Innocent times. As high school went on, some of my friends started drifting toward the drinking-and-partying angle and were no longer quite satisfied with a mere hang-out, but that was okay.

It's interesting, going back and thinking about friendships through the years. The aforementioned Mark was my best friend from seventh grade to high-school graduation. When it turned out we were both going to the same university, I thought "Hot damn, the good times will just keep rollin'!" And then...college happened. In my dorm, I made all kinds of new friends very quickly, which was something that I had never really experienced before. Thanks to these new friends, I started discovering the enjoyable type of college party (protip: they're usually at co-ops). It was a heady time. Meanwhile, Mark spent a lot of time in one of the other dorms, where a large handful of our high school friends had ended up in a hall together. Those guys and their hallmates bonded pretty quickly, too, and they had a great time. I visited usually once a week to hang out with the gang, and I loved being around that crowd - old and new - but it was very different from the days when we would all meet up at somebody's locker every morning and walk around the school before class started. All four years of college, it was a pretty similar story: Mark and the dudes lived far away from me, and I would visit regularly but not necessarily frequently. We were all still friends, but best friends was a hard label to apply.

But starting the first summer after freshman year of college, I got a standing invitation to join Mark and his family at their house up north. We always have an absolute blast, and it's always a bummer to part ways when the nine-day week is over. Those weeks always remind me why Mark and I were so close, and make me want to spend more time with him. However, somehow, once the school year started back up, I always fell into the same habit of only seeing him and the rest of the high school gang every once in a while. Why? I'm not sure. And every summer, I felt rather guilty accepting that invitation, considering the sub-par effort I'd put into maintaining our friendship in the interim.

I hope that, seeing as several of us high-school chums have moved back home, we'll get back into our old groove. Plus, I'm no longer the only one who drinks, so that's another social divide between us that's been sealed. But at the same time, I wonder what will happen when I move. I will not be back home forever - not even for a year, if I meet my goals - and I am excited at the prospect of starting a new period in my life. Having my own place, making actual amounts of money, getting a change of scenery. The problem is that when I find a new home, I will probably need to find new friends. I won't have dorms or classes to force me into amicable social encounters with like-minded people. I won't have high-school friends to reconnect with. Oh, and a large percentage of my dorm-spawned friendships can be traced through Alia, another high school friend who ended up in the same hall as me. Frankly, I don't think I know how one goes about meeting new people in the Real World.

Maybe, though, it'll just be like what happened with my friends when we went to college, but on a bigger scale. It could be that I'll make lots of new friends in whatever city I wind up in, and I'll become a bit distant with all my college friends. But if that happens, there will probably be weekends or weeks where I go back and visit with all those college friends, and those times will end up being the most genuine fun I've had in a long time. Maybe the "specialness" of seeing those people after a dry spell is what makes it so much more exciting - like my weeks with Mark and his family. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. I hope it's true, because I don't want to close the book on my college life and relationships just yet.

I know this is kind of rambling, stream-of-consciousness stuff. Sorry!

Racebending and Ethnicity Issues in Hollywood

If you haven't read my earlier essay that discussed Avatar: The Last Airbender, allow me to fill you in on some of the show's core concepts - by quoting the monologue that begins every episode:

"Water.. Earth.. Fire.. Air.. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them but when the world needed him most, he vanished. A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new Avatar, an airbender named Aang. And although his airbending skills are great, he still has a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world..."

So that's that. It's a pretty straightforward epic fantasy story, albeit extremely well-done for a kids' show. Now, the animation style is strongly influenced by Japanese anime rather than "typical" American animation. However, in addition to that, almost every element within the series' universe is borrowed from various Asian cultures. The written language of all four nations is Chinese calligraphy - a point which the producers felt was so important to get right that they hired an expert. Each nation has its own form of martial art/elemental control, each of which is essentially a real-world Asian martial art with magic added: Airbending is Bagua, Waterbending is Tai Chi, Firebending is Shaolin, and Earthbending is Hung Ga. They got an expert for that one, too. In terms of visual culture - architecture, clothing, hairstyles, and even skin tones - the Fire Nation resembles primarily Tang Dynasty China, the Earth Kingdom draws from both Qing Dynasty China and Korea, and the Air Nomads are mostly Tibetan-inspired. The Water Tribe, which is mostly informed by Inuit culture, is kind of the odd one out. Even so, can we agree that the show has very little caucasian influence, aside from the language spoken? Good.

....But now they're making a movie of it, and things are going awry.

A Tumblr for Patrick!

In case anyone is interested, I've finally caved in and gotten a Tumblr to share all the awesome pictures I've saved over the years. Enjoy it!

http://classyshenanigans.tumblr.com/

...Also, this will prevent me from being tempted to make posts on this blog containing a single image.

100 Words #1

The other day, I felt inspired to do a little writing exercise: the hundred-word story. I recall doing stuff like this in high school and really enjoying it. I think I'm pretty good at setting a scene, if I say so myself, so this kind of thing suits me well!

*  *  *

Before the tramp could see the train, he could hear it coming. Not the rumble of the engine or the click-clack of the wheels, but the vibrations traveling through the rails. The steel hummed and twanged like something alive, reaching frequencies that made his teeth hurt. It reminded him of his youth on the farm, watching rabbits and voles fleeing the thresher that was chewing up their field. He stretched and picked up his pack. The train came, the pitch of its horn bending in his ears as it approached - and passed.

"Oh," he said sadly, "not stopping today."

Video Games as Art

 Donkey Kong, 1981

I recently read an article by the esteemed Roger Ebert entitled "Video Games Can Never Be Art." Ebert's core declaration is this: "No one in or out of the [gaming industry] has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." Regardless of what you may think of video games, I think it can be agreed that this is a distressingly strong assertion. All art is, after all, subjective, even within the fields Ebert mentions. Generational differences play a large part as well - I imagine that Dickens might have a hard time accepting the novels of Cormac McCarthy (an author that Ebert specifically praises in the article) as "art". Then again, Dickens might not even think of his own writing as art; only relatively recently have we been so keen to draw a line between what is and isn't art across all media. My point is that Ebert is positioning himself as a voice of authority on what can be considered art - an egregious error as it is - and views video games with a fairly narrow mindset.

More after the jump!