Godzilla Countdown: Day 5

Five days in and I've successfully transitioned from giving up on everything to distracting myself with something else. As it usually goes, I'll make spreadsheets or read stuff on Something Awful or watch a let's play or something else that, for normal people, would an entertaining break from responsibility. When you don't have anything else, it isn't really "entertaining," it's more like finding something to stare at that's more interesting than a wall. This is the sort of thing kids who don't know any better dream of, just watching cartoons all day, a perceived paradise. The thing that those kids, including myself at that age, didn't understand is that doing something on your time off is inherently different from doing the same thing constantly forever. It doesn't matter what it is, it really doesn't, you can't just stare at the same thing without a break and stay sane for very long. For people with lives, even monotonous cubicle jobs are broken up with even the most menial of indulgences. A few friends and a day off every once in a while can keep people from going postal due to the soul-crushing tedium of a desk job.

I can't just sit here. I can't live like this. I need... something. To do something, to write something, to go somewhere, to meet new people and have new experiences. You CAN'T just sit around all day like this, it's not natural. Watching funny internet videos should be a fun experience, but now my eyes just glaze over at it. The lack of any sort of... life in me has made things that should be fun feel like a desk job. Except non of this requires any effort on my part. Simply being alive has become a never ending chore me. I still have the means to do so, but taking the minimum effort to remember to eat is a thing I actively have to do, and it isn't something I relish. At least if I was starving in a ditch somewhere I could die like I'm supposed to instead of... whatever the fuck this is.

The things I get lost in are recursive, there's nothing new here. Hauntology only really fed what was already there, I've always been "haunted by the ghosts of the past" as it were. I think it really goes back to high school, when I realized that the whole "finding myself" thing was a complete waste of what could have been the best years of my life, but I squandered it trying to be someone else like some kind of god damned moron. Alcohol didn't help either, there was a period from 2007~2008 when I pined for "the good old days," which sometimes would be as long ago as *gasp* a week! I called this "perpetual regret," the idea that you always remember the past with rose-colored glasses and regret that you didn't appreciate your experiences enough, and that attitude created a perpetual feedback loop where because you were always thinking of the past, you could never appreciate what you did have.

So here I am reliving every Godzilla movie in a row plus the cartoon and some other things, distracting myself from the fact that I'm never going to get any less ugly or any more employable by desperately clinging to the one thing I'm still passionate enough about that Hollywood destroying it matters. Today I'm going to watch Godzilla vs. Biollante, my favroite thing in the world, probably for the last time.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 4

I'm settling into this post the day after thing. And that's great, because after feeling not just a tad under pressure by my own ambitions to finish this sort of... I guess you'd call it a journal of sorts, but after getting through what I intended the past two days, today the schedule is pretty lax.

Well, sort of. I only plan on just doing the two Showa Mechagodzilla films today, but in addition as first season of the cartoon. Also, I have a really shitty copy, but a copy nonetheless, of Luigi Cozzi's 1977 colorized version of the original film, which I will be watching today for the first time. I'm already at the climax of GvsMG, so before midnight I'll be starting the cartoon, which I happen to enjoy quite a bit.

Tomorrow I'll do the other half of the cartoon, and move on to the 80's, ending, of course, with Godzilla vs. Biollante, mankind's greatest achievement. That's going to be a pretty big deal. But for today I've been sort of easing out a bit. After all, when we're done with Biollante will have to go through the entire rest of the Heisei and Millennium series in two days.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 3

I left so much of the last post undone before I went to sleep that I'm only getting started on this at 17. I just finished watching Destroy All Monsters a second ago, so I'm planning on trying to keep at a pace of writing the impressions from one movie while I'm watching the other. This should also help me curb my obsessive compulsive screenshot taking, as I generated over 800 from yesterday, so I gotta calm down in that regard. These movies are just too gorgeous, it's not my fault. :c

Feeling a little pressure, and not, uh, well. I can't really describe it. But I'm not real happy about the way this is going. My sister's family called today, since it's mother's day apparently. I have nothing at all to say to them, and my nephew just... what, he's winning at dominos? And then what? I tell him "that's cool" but he just goes quiet. I start asking my mom about if she's going to be off on the 16th and I forget I'm even on the phone until I hear my sister in the background talking about something or another. I'm so far past caring.

I was working on the post for yesterday so much that I ended up only paying attention to DAM just enough as necessary. My eyes are kind of starting to glaze over at this point, because as I type this I'm watching All Monsters Attack or "Godzilla's Revenge" as we used to call it back in the day, and holy shit this movie is annoying. Well let's move on.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 2

Today I'm just going to breeze through as many 60's movies as I can. Hopefully all of them, but that depends on how much commentary I end up giving each. If I don't get to All Monsters Attack today I'm going to consider cutting the cartoon. But we'll see. Actually, I'm going to try today to just watch the films all at once and type up the relevant blog entries later. That should work out fine.

I'm feeling okay today. Doing a lot of watching, thinking about, and writing about Godzilla puts me in a pretty good place. I'm gonna try and calm down and enjoy this day as much as I can. Sure, I don't have a future anymore, but I have a present, and right now that's really all I want.

22 now where I am and I've watched the "Honda era" or "Golden era" films, being from King Kong to Monster Zero. There is still coffee in the pot from this morning, something like 10 hours ago. So I'm definitely going to get through the south seas eras too, but first let's look at those aforementioned golden era Godzilla films.

Godzilla Countdown: Day 1

A week from now, Hollywood is going to kill the king of the monsters. And this time he's not coming back. With gino 2 or "Godzilla" which is literally the laziest possible title (I suppose theoretically they could have just called it "Movie") for a movie ostensibly about or related to Godzilla in some way, being a AAA tentpole blockbuster style flick that caters specifically to the "nerd culture" "true gamer" and whatever the fuck else you want to call them synthetic demographic, which is just marketing speak for "18-24 year old men but under a label we invented to make them easier to control." While it may barely be possible that the movie itself ends up being no more offensive than the Hannah-Barbera cartoon or Peter Jackson's King Kong, this commandeering of what Godzilla is and the creation of an entirely new demographic that has absolutely no interest in anything that has to do with the real Godzilla is going to spell disaster regardless.

The problem is that money speaks, and Hollywood wants a product, not a character. By buying editorial space in sites like io9 or Kotaku or IGN they guarantee that mouth-breathing idiots with disposable incomes that need to be told what to consume will turn whatever they shit out into a franchise. This is business as a dictator, holding a vertical monopoly over both their engineered audience and media, as opposed to the middle man that is supposed to sell art to the audience that wants it. Not a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather a perpetual feedback machine where a few people in power pull the strings to maintain that power continuously with no other goal in mind, and at the expense of the resources they use to do it.

And you know what really kills me is that if they had just made a normal god damned Godzilla movie I wouldn't even care. I'll take off the They Live! glasses and consume if you just did what you were supposed to do and put forth the minimum effort to at least pretend like you care. If you don't think modern audiences want the very core of what makes a Godzilla movie a Godzilla movie well then why the fuck did you buy the license? Buy the license to something you know for a fact modern audiences DO want. Why is that so difficult for the suits to understand?

Things are also coming to a conclusion for me. In the past few days my mood has been swinging around more wildly as the last little bits of life I have left in me are going out. Godzilla has been a huge part of my life since before my earliest memories, the age of two to be precise, and much of who I am can be tracked using Godzilla as a measurement, so much so that having my life flash before my eyes basically looks like Godzilla clip show. I don't mean to sound shallow, there's more going on here and more to me than just that, but I think by the time I get up to Godzilla vs. Biollante what I'm talking about should be pretty clear.

If you haven't picked it up, what I'm talking about, and what this post is going to be the first part of, is a series where I watch every Godzilla movie, the one episode of Zone Fighter I have, the cartoon, hopefully Always 2, and assorted other bits over the course of a week leading up to May 16th. It's going to be as much of a retrospective of what was once the greatest monster that ever lived in the imagination of man as it will be an extremely personal journey for me. If that sounds like a bummer to you, then you don't have to read it. I don't really have an audience with this blog and I've only ever used it in the past for... well, things I just wanted to say at the time. This isn't going to be any different.

One last thing that I'll say before I get on with it is that I'm going to write these in real time. This intro is being written before I've started and each entry will be written after each I've watched the film in question. I don't really have a plan on what I'm going to get through today, but as we move along I'll have more of an intended structure.

So let's get on with it and start the final countdown of a Mal and her Monster:

Steam is the worst thing that has ever existed, WORSE THAN HITLER

RAGE. It's not just the name of id's latest game. As it turns out, the name isn't so much of a metaphor as it is the actual physical product itself. Maybe that doesn't make much sense, but you have to understand that whatever the fuck is in that $60 dvd case, it sure the fuck isn't a god damned video game.

So, I've got this video game sitting here, right in front of me, and I can't play it. Why? I don't know. I've been searching for a solution for an hour now and nothing really works. What I've found out is terrifying. For one, the game isn't even on the fucking disc. I'm sorry, the three discs. For two, even if the game is installed on the fucking computer it WILL NOT RUN. FOR NO FUCKING REASON.

Just to reiterate:

 - The actual fucking game is sitting right FUCKING NEXT TO ME
 - It is already INSTALLED ON THE MOTHERFUCKING COMPUTER
 - Despite that, because I'm not the person who installed it, I can't PLAY OR EVEN INSTALL IT

I CAN'T PLAY A FUCKING GAME I HAVE SITTING RIGHT IN FUCKING GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF FAGGOT ASSED CUNT-SWALLOWING TURD WAFFLE SHIT-SUCKING BALL-LICKING FRONT OF ME.

Mature Themes (HG 11?)

There's a new Ariel Pink thing happening. After touring the entire planet like four times, he finally got the whole live outfit (R-real, Tim, ...Aaron, and... the fourth one...) in a studio and wrote a whole fucking album of NEW things (except the cover), which is 12 completely NEW songs, not just a rehash like the "corporate sampler" was (which wasn't ALL old stuff, but that was certainly a large chunk), one of which is available already thanks to 4AD.

He's ALSO going to be by Austin on September 7th and then at the Granada in Dallas the day after.

Naturally, I will be making both.

And that's not a "maybe" thing. I'm GOING to both. That's the end. It's non-negotiable.

So what is post-BT Ariel like? From what I can tell so far, a little more coherent, and sort of '82-'86 sounding. Sort of like a soundtrack to an 80's teen movie. That's kind of a new directing to take hauntology in, near as I can tell, if only because it's so specific, but then again, it's not like other people haven't been specific before.

And I think the only reason it does sound so specific is because I'm used to a really nebulously placed Ariel. Sure, Somewhere in Europe/Hot Pink is as 70's punk as you can get, and Among Dreams or Shower Me in Lipstick is obnoxiously 86, but still, MOST of his output is confused and mixed and muddled as far as pinpointing exact styles go, and that's part of the reason I love him so much. Geneva does her specific period style, WaVVes does his, and Ghost Box do their thing, but Ariel was always very fluid and free-form. In fact, the earliest stuff that still exists online is borderline, and sometimes just plain industrial in its construction. Equus and Rainy Den both come to mind.

The whole album is likely to run the gammut again. Even flirting with 90's stuff, which is traditionally not his style since he's been active SINCE the 90's, but Butt House Blondies certainly heads in that direction. I'm only really getting into this because a post that just says "omg new Ariel Pink I'm so happy I could burst" is sort of pointless.

But it does raise an interesting question: what is POST-Hauntology? Or, where do we go from here?

See, the whole thing about hauntology was that, after John Cage, concrete, industrial, minimalism, sampling, and music that writes itself, what else is there to do but lather, rinse, repeat? Hauntology took that and ran with it, but not with current trends, but old one. Looking back several decades, taking those themes and styles, and revisiting them. Turns out we weren't really DONE with them yet. There was so much more to do. Last decade was really nuts too, we had everything. 70's, 60's, 80's, and even 90's. Some even went waaaay back and did 20's sounding ethereal soundscapes. For various reasons. Chiptune music exploded, and with the advent of youtube being more important than the radio, suddenly there was a way for EVERYTHING to reach its intended demographic. There were some trends, sure, but if you wanted it, it was there.

Another aspect of revisiting older styles was the actual "haunting" part of it. "Music that sounds older than it is" is an incredibly shallow descriptor, and something no one actually does on purpose. And I mean that, too, no one who's any good at it does it on purpose. There is some sort of bizarre sub-species of nostalgia associated with it. It's not really "boy howdy I miss the old days" but sort of like... um... this is hard to explain.

You know that feeling when you listen to an Ariel Pink song for the first time and it's just so inherently familiar? Like you've known it all your life? But it's sort of weird and alien? Like the 70's or 80's of a different timeline where disco never died or something? It's sideways nostalgia, but... even that doesn't quite get it.

It's very haunting, I guess is the best term.

But now that it has been explored enough for people to become familiar with it, and it to ooze into every facet of popular culture (except Hollywood, who still hasn't gotten the memo), and long enough for solid trends to develop (the 80's obsession from 2008 onwards becoming connected to chillwave, for example), what's next?

Is it now "done?" Is there more out there to discover or do? Are we stuck in a perpetual cycle of repeating ourselves like modern fashion is? With the ability for all tastes to find all markets, does it matter? Is there anything left?

I don't really know. What I DO know is that I've been sort of ambivalent about music lately. I've been mostly listening to Firesign Theater and Psychedelic Archaeology. Ariel was touring Mars and I couldn't be bothered to keep up with anyone else. I don't know what Geneva or WaVVes or Telepathe or anyone is up to anymore.

This is mostly because Trish Keenan had to go and die on me. I've been avoiding a lot of things because of that.

And I don't really HAVE a guess about what's next, because I don't know enough about what's going on anymore to comment. I feel sort of lost in the whole thing now. Maybe oversaturation is partly to blame and the bubble will burst or something. Maybe we'll go back to Romantic-era hauntology. Maybe we'll do hauntology-hauntology. Not sure how that would work but whatever.

But considering what happened to noise (homogeneity, nothing left to do, not really intimidating anymore, etc.) it's not likely there's much left to do there. I remember hearing about a new NON album, which doesn't seem to be forthcoming at the moment, that would be really intense, since Boyd was the only one who ever seemed to "get it." Noise is noise is noise is noise, but when you DO something with it, that's when it turns into something special. Carnis Vale and Embers come to mind.

Anwyas, this is getting long so I'd better cut out.

Oh, the Deacon IS a xenomorph, just not a jockey alien. Lindelof seems to be implying that it's an egg-layer, too. Don't know what that's all about. For the record, I liked Prometheus better than the last Alien movie, because its cons and pros cancelled each other out, so all that's left is whether or not you have a special like for Alien movies, which I do, so I think it just barely squeezes out ok. AlienS vs. Predator (which doesn't need the subtitle because it's alienS vs. and not alieN vs., which is just one more stupid aspect of that movie) has too much weighing against it, with the only real positives being the continually masterful work of Tom and Alec as well as the introduction of the Praetorian into the film series for the first time. OH! And Ms. Yutani makes an appearance, and they finally explain how we invented FTL so fucking fast. Other than that, the movie is a mess. Prometheus > AvP:R.

I MADE A LIST! My favorite Alien movies (in order! :3)
7. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
6. Prometheus
5. Alien
4. Aliens
3. Alien: Resurrection
2. Alien vs. Predator
1. Alien 3

This list is just for fun, though. In reality, AvP and Rez are about equal in my books, and I have a love/hate relationship with the original movie that straddles the line of how I feel about Prometheus even though I definitely like Alien more than the movie where Space Jockey look like humans and also created humans by seeding Earth with DNA even though RNA came first and if they just dropped DNA then why do other lifeforms on Earth besides humans exist and... ok, I'm not going there. :/

How did I get from Ariel Pink to Alien movies? Whatever.

Buy buy.