I have had a distinct lack of inspiration to write recently. This can be evidenced by the fact that the only thing visible on my front page (items posted within the last week) is titled "Blank", and the content is exactly what the title describes. I really don't want this page to turn into a ghost site. Therefore, I am forcing myself to write tonight, even though I don't particularly feel motivated to do so.

The first attempt at this rambling, which lasted about five minutes and contained around a dozen sentence paragraphs of redundant nothingness, sucked horribly. Trust me. Finally, it ended in a burst of frustration in which I typed ":q!", and that was that. But now, I have started over. This effort, however, will be published.

I have been enjoying Madonna's latest release, American Life. I've probably listened to the thing in its entirity nearly a dozen times since purchasing it on Tuesday.

During my first run through it, I was inclined to agree with some of the less favorable reviews by critics. For the most part, lackluster and mediocre, especially after the power punch of sonic energy and emotion that was Music.

But then I listened again. Perhaps I was not willing to accept so quickly that an artist who has done right by her fans for 20 years would suddenly put out a disc with only one or two good songs, and the rest consisting of filler crap. Had I missed something?

After a couple of listens, something about it gradually started to soak in and resonate with me. And I found myself playing it again. And again. And again. And I dig it.

I recognize the possibility that my opinion could be swayed due to prior bias. If the same thing had been put out by an artist with whom I wasn't familiar, maybe I wouldn't have even given it a second listen. Could it be that I have convinced myself that I like it simply due to the fact that it was put out by Madonna? Maybe that's part of it, but I think there's more.

(Preexisting perceptions, however, can also work the other way. A high expectation might lead to disappointment. Inevitably, many comparisions have been drawn between American Life to Music, with a lot of critics less impressed with the more recent work.)

Ok, I didn't initially intend to go on about this subject at such length, but now that I'm underway, I need to finish my thouhts.

So, inevitable comparisons. Here's mine. American Life muddles in melancholy and doubt where Music shimmered with carefree vibrance and optimism. The first track, which also happens to be the title track in both cases, sets the tone for the entire album. American Life opens with a poetic litany that amounts to a critique of... well... American life. The prognosis turns out less than favorable.

(This thesis is expressed with much more explicit directness on the album than on the radio/web single of the song. The single, which could be interpreted as playfully ambiguous in its conclusions, leaves the listener with a sort of question mark. American Life. Is it for me? On the album, the message becomes bold and blatent, with the addition of a single phrase, repeated multiple times: "Fuck it." I enjoyed both approaches.)

From there, the music descends into a bleak exploration prompted by opening, with Hollywood and I'm So Stupid. With track 4, Love Profusion, new flavors emerge. Starting in the mood of the cloudy depression created by the preceeding songs, a spot of sunshine is found.

In a wave a typical pop sentimentalism, love is presented as The Way to betterness. Awwww... How sweet and sappy. But the song works for. It's got the hooks, or something.

Nobody Knows Me is the most mechanical-sounding of all, making what might be the heaviest use to date of the frequency-altering synth voice machine thing. (I know it's called something, but I can't remember the name for the life of me.) Again, the message is to spit out the depersonalizing poison within American culture ("I don't want no lies, I don't watch tv"), while embracing love. ("Nobody knows me like you know me")

Nothing Fails starts as a ballad, an ode to a treasured lover. It begins with Madonna simply singing, backed by an acoustic guitar and relatively minimal (for this album) accompanyment. Midway through the song, a choral anthem bursts out of the ether, with what sounds like an entire cathedral full of singers.

Intervention and X-Static Process, both relatively strong ballads about struggles in a relationship.

Mother and Father delves back into the past. It covers territory not unfamiliar to a Madonna album, the death of her mother. We've been here before. Not the strongest track on the album IMO. Redundant. A part of me wants her to just get over it after all these years and move on. Then again, I didn't have a parent die at age 5. To make a gross understatement, I guess that would be a difficult thing to shake.

Die Another Day. Every critic I have ever read likes to poo all over this song as being the worst James Bond tune ever. I didn't see the fucking movie. I don't particularly care that much about James Bond flicks. But I like this song, and I for one am glad 102.1X keeps it on their frequent playlist. It's a great techno song. By being stuck onto a James Bond movie, it got a bad rap. As far as I can tell, the themes in the lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with anything James Bond stands for, so maybe they were right to say it didn't work on a Bond film. It didn't belong there.

As far as I can tell, Die Another Day is a play on the Buddhist concept of cessation. I'm not going out on a limb when I say this. It's all through the lyrics. Why this one somehow got tacked on as a theme to a Bond film (which I haven't seen, so maybe I'm missing something) is a mystery.

Anyway...

The album wraps up with Easy Ride, a listless, dreamy vision of what could constitute the ideal life. Every verse begins with the two words used in answer to the question the Shadows ask of everybody.

...the good life ...to know everything ...to find my place ...to let go of all disappointment ...to live forever.

Ironically, by closing the album in defining these concepts of the ideal, we are reminded how far from that ideal the reality of American Life (or life in this world in general) rests. Or maybe there is hope?

Regardless of how one interprets the conclusion, there is no question that many of the themes in this album are rooted in a disillusionment with the way things are in the here and now. Perhaps that's why it resonates with me. My life is in a slump right now, right along with our beautifully fucked up economy.

If the output of pop culture is reflective of the times, economic and otherwise, then Madonna is right on the money by putting out a (largely) depressing album right in the middle of a recession while an unpopular war has been waged abroad. The exuberant Music was recorded during the boom, and released just as the good times were on the way out (but Wall Street still looked rosy in 09/2000, wishfully speaking).

Is this a crass and cynical attempt to capitalize on popular sentiment? Or is the artist, as one of the population, experiencing the same trends that the rest of us feel, and aptly expressesing them in musical form? It is impossible to determine with certainty. I prefer to believe the latter.

Or maybe it's all just random coincidence, there is no real correlary, and I'm babbling bullshit over the web at 1am on a Saturday night. New topic.

Last night, after playing several epic games with the Kohan people (I lost every time, but it was still fun), I went home (in a relative sense) and finished reading Stephenson's Snow Crash in a 4 hour stretch. (It's been my novel of choice since Wednesday of last week.)

Mini-review (won't be half as long as my American Life BS session, I promise):

The prose will blow you away. On my best day, I might aspire to write with as much energy and creative force as Stephenson maintains for over 400 pages in this work. Present tense. Always at the cusp of the action, pulling you into the scene, and into the minds of those who inhabit it.

His characters also inspire me. Like me, they find themselves tossed about in the insanity of a chaotic postmodern reality. Unlike me, they seem to have a sense of purpose and direction within the void. Maybe someday, that will be me. But not today.

I suppose the only critical thing I would say is that at times, it gets so involved in moving things forward that critical plot points seem glossed over or skipped altogether. Yes, we readers can be smart enough to figure out the essence of the missing pieces, which is obviously intended. But still, I would feel better if there was a description -- even a brief one -- of how Hiro dealt with police and got home after his pizza car crashed. Or what happened to Y.T.'s mom between her endless interrogation by the feds and their final reunion at the airport. Obviously, she got away, or they let her go, but there isn't even a single mention of how she got out. Hiro's uber gargoyle stuff. When, where, and how did he get it? These sorts of glaring omissions bug me, even if they're part of the stylistic nature of the work.

What really made the book was the whole metavirus/Asherah/Enki me thing, and how it ties into the Biblical story of Babel. As far as realism goes... To this hacker, it almost seems plausable, and certainly intriguing as a concept. I won't try to summarize it, because he spends many pages explaining it, and even then (like everything in the book), the picture is still somewhat sketchy.

Fascinating stuff though.

...

For the past 2 afternoons, I have spent a non-trivial amount of time at the ongoing project of making my room at mom's place something other than a nearly untraversable disaster zone. I have too much fucking stuff, and it doesn't all fit comfortably in there. The result is that for the past several months, I have slept in a room where one must tiptoe between haphazardly piled boxes, laundry baskets, and god-knows-what other sorts of shit just to get from the door to the bed.

I finally decided that I have had enough of it.

Today, I took all my books out of the cardboard boxes and situated most of them in my bookshelf. I had been avoiding unpacking them because of the wishful thinking along the lines of, "I'll only be here for a couple more months until I find a better paying job and can rent an apartment again."

I was tired of having to dig and rifle through all my boxes every time I want to find and read another of my books. So now they're on the bookshelf, where I can access them relatively easily. (A few are still on the floor, because they wouldn't all fit. And now a bunch of other shit that used to be on the bookshelf is scattered randomly around the floor. Still, it's better than it was before.)

You know what this means, right? Now that I have unpacked completely and fully (not quite true -- my kitchen stuff is still in boxes in the closet), I will probably end up moving out within the next month. However, in the event that this happens, I will not consider it a calamity, especially if it means I get my own place again. I will happily repack my freshly unpacked books without complaint, and rejoice. If only...

...

Tonight, I finally got around to watching a couple of the DVD movies loaned to me not so long ago by a friend in the area. I laid back on the couch right next to Argo, behind where I am presently sitting, and watched 28 Days, followed by Miss Congeniality.

Both movies, the first a drama, the second a comedy, are both relatively predictable and formulaic in their narrative, use uninnovative, maybe even bland, cinematography, and lack any other sort of distinctive production characteristic which might make a movie stand out from the crowd. I'm not even bothering to write real movielog entries for them, because I have so little to say.

However, these two movies do share a common virtue, which by itself makes any movie worth watching. One name: Sandra Bullock.

I'm going to bed now. Goodnight.