Eleven Names: Summer Offensive

It's a popular time to come back. Electronic Arts announced they're going back to basics after spending $620 million to acquire BioWare and Pandemic Studios, both not exactly suppliers of mainstream bread and butter content. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, after a long hiatus are doing a summer tour with the Dropkick Murphys. Shai Hulud is putting out a new full length disc, after the last full length disc took roughly seven years to be released. Sega announced that it's publishing games from developer Platinum, which means that this is the official return of Clover Studios (You might have heard of Okami...) brass to work on new IPs.

(Mind of Mencia is also getting restarted, which means that if you like thoughtless "racial" humor that involves making fun of Mexicans and saying dee dee dee, you have something to look forward to. It means I'm going to want to submerge my skull in lava.)

Speaking of Skull (the mascot/lovable troll of webcomic PvP), he's leaving PvP. For good. 

Finally, us! We're doing new things with Eleven Names, or, to be precise, we're doing old things again. We're going back to theme weeks, when the four of us reconvene (with luck, this week), announcing new sources of content (soon!)  and hopefully having great content in store for  you. My perspective, is of course, quite different from Tom or Zach's. It's my hope that there's something more scheduled and regular for you, Zach is more of a "take 'em as they come" spirit, so there's a bit of friction there.

We do want to extend a lot of thanks to Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Beth for their contributions, and among other things, we owe them a drink for their help in the birth of the site.

I would call this an indefinite hiatus, since, technically, we don't know when all of us are going to be on the internets at the same time, and our schedules do conflict, but, we are certain we are going to bring you new, as at least one banner suggests, juice from our mind grapes. It might take a while to bottle, but I think you'll find it's worth it.

Antony and Cleopatra, and the brain.

My dear friends of the internet,

If I may introduce myself, my name is Jack Grey. I'm ever so slightly overeducated, a fishmonger, a drinker of fine teas, and a magician. I'm tattooed and hermaphroditic.

Favourite authors include Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin, and Emily Post. (I thought it best that you were forewarned.) I think that trying to choose one's favourite Shakespearean play is a bit like trying to select one's most useful internal organ.

I'm between world travels at the moment. I'm drawn to antiques, to decadent cultures, to historical moments at which savage civilisations met strange natives.

But I suppose it's best to be on with it. I've heard that we're summoning ghosts.

I can, I think, safely state that we modern Americans are quite madly in love with the Victorians. We adore their fading photographs, their marvellously purple phrases, their stockings, the devastatingly straight lines of their suits, their conflicting romantic notions: prudish and prurient, secretive and enduring. We emulate their wallpapers, and, if I may be allowed to speak for all of us, we miss their manners. Desperately.

I would argue that this love affair with an epoch is well timed. Our empire is crumbling. It is no surprise that we'd look longingly to the culture of the fallen empire that we remember best. Perhaps we want to feel ourselves surrounded by their ghosts. We want to believe that we, too, will be remembered fondly by absurdly dressed Japanese teenagers in some glowing future. Or we want to learn to die gracefully. Or we really do just love the wallpaper.

Besides sharing in the collective obsession with the Victorians, I also like taxidermy a great deal. They were fond of the art, in fact.

They, I think, were doing it in conquest. When they were gaining their empire, they were sailing to strange lands, finding beautiful, naked creatures they didn't understand in the least, and animals of which they'd never dreamed, even in the mythologies of the empires that they themselves remembered fondly. The Pre-Raphealites, for example, were quite fond of the wombat, and there is the famous story of the first taxidermic platypus sent back to Britain: the receiver responded that it was a terrible joke and a hideous fake, that, clearly, no such beast could exist.

Taxidermy is enjoying a small revival, if only in my own mind. We, however, are not trying to catalogue dark continents, or to prove our masculinity or our skill with an elephant gun. We're clutching, once more, at ghosts. As our supremacy fades, we're forced to confront the fact that we've taken more than we ought. We've created quite the ecological mess, and, as a few monumentally populous nations in the East begin their own Industrial Revolutions that, we're a bit shocked to discover, we cannot stop, we note that we aren't dying alone.

I don't know about you, but I want an elegantly mounted gazelle head. I want gorgeous stuffed peacocks, taxidermic piranhas, gorilla skulls, and a stuffed crocodile, which I'll display in my study, so that my friends will understand instantly that I'm a magician of great skill. And I want them because, I'm afraid, their living counterparts may not be long for this world. The Victorians stole these creatures away from their native lands in order to prove that they were real. I'm afraid that we may need to begin preserving them for the same reason.

Yours always,

Jack

Theme Week: Hello?

Saying hello is something every person has to do, eventually. It is an introduction to the person that follows. That's simple enough, but when you're a band who is putting out a new release, with what track do introduce the listener to your new material? How do you present your new artistic statement? Do you start a track that reassures fans that you haven't changed too much? Do you start with an example of your new sound? Do you start with the best song?

If you're Rise Against, and you're introducing Siren Song of the Counter Culture, you start with the absolutely ripping/nearly speed metal of State of the Union, which, by the way, will have you flailing your arms pretending there's a drum set in your immediate vicinity. This CD, of course, contained, their acoustic radio hit, "Swing Life Away", but as an introduction to the "new" Rise Against disc, it worked wonders. Put on the internet by the band a month in advance, the response was electric, and silenced the critics that said their new digs at Dreamworks softened them.

If you're dance-punk collective Head Automatica, and you're introducing Decadence, your best foot forward is the 2:14 ass-shaking "At the Speed of a Yellow Bullet", whose lyrical content is about an arms dealer. "I'm burning houses, baby!" Darryl exclaims and you're wondering just the guy is saying and why your hips are moving to it, but the beat just keeps going, and your body continues its motions.

If you’re math-metal wunderkinds Dillinger Escape Plan, and you’re introducing your new full length Miss Machine, you choose “Parasonic Youth” (currently downloadable on their MySpace page) as your opening track with your new singer screaming WE WROTE THESE PLANS, then you start with the inhumanly fast drumbeat with absurdly heavy guitars and you let that greet listeners who wonder if the 5 years between records and the new singer has had changed Dillinger dramatically.

Of course, if you're former-Misfits-fiends-turned-quazi-Brit-rockers AFI, and the disc you're introducing is the hotly anticipated Decemberunderground, you'll start with "Prelude 12/21" the same kind of gang vocal chanting that introduced your other major label release, Sing the Sorrow, with hints of the "cold-pop" flavor that is to come on Decemberunderground in the background.

If you're genre-defining act Minor Threat, you'll sequence your career discography such that possibly your most angry and to the point song "Filler", a 1:32 song about religion and violence, is the first song the listener hears. The aesthetic, short, fast, loud and nearly incomprehensible vocals would resonate through America.

And if you're me? You avoid the topic altogether, and weakly point back to your original post as evidence that you’ve followed through on the theme before it was announced If that doesn’t work, talk about some bands and releases you've come to cherish, and hope through speaking about the bands, the music, man, you've made a nice introduction to your character.

Oh well. Here’s how I introduce myself in public: nervously. Perhaps with a joke. A self-deprecating shot at least a minute into the conversation. Leave the vicinity as quickly as diplomatically possible, hoping I’ve come off passably.

If it’s an attractive member of the opposite sex, I just aim for not stammering and putting together a couple coherent sentences. Really, it’s all you can hope for in an introduction. Real conversations are for later.

P.S. Tom, as for who I’ve been mistaken for, the ones I remember are Daniel Radcliffe, a couple times every year, someone’s girlfriend (twice in the same week!) by the same guy, various 30 year old women and really, not much else.