Alexander Hellene's Blog, page 4

My Music Rating Scale

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You might be sick of me writing about Rush, but I’m not sick of writing about Rush. I’m going to be doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: review and rate all of their albums.

But here’s the kicker: I’m going to review them on a song-by-song basis, tabulate the scores, and make my ratings as objective as possible based upon the following rating scale:

Awful. No redeeming qualities.Awful, but at least one redeeming quality.Pretty bad, but a few redeeming qualities.So bad it’s good. Listenable despite its badness.Bad, but enjoyable.A decent, perfectly serviceable rock song you wouldn’t change if it came on the radio. Might be fun, might be catchy, but is nothing special.A good rock song you would actually turn up if it came on the radio, yet still lacks some ineffable quality that pushes it further.A really good, memorable rock song that is catchy and has some unique quality that stretches the band or pushes its sound forward.An excellent song. Iconic. Basically flawlessA perfect song that goes beyond iconic into legendary. You wouldn’t change a note. It has that ineffable factor you can’t describe that resonates with you and pushes a 9 to a 10.

A good, though not ironclad rule, I’ll be keeping in mind is this: if given the choice between two songs, I’d rather listen to a 10 over a 9, a 9 over an 8, and so on.

I debated reserving the right to add or subtract bonus points based upon how well the album holds together as a unified whole, but decided against that because I think the final, song-based scores will speak for themselves.

Lastly, I will be giving each album cover a separate rating on an entirely different scale:

Awful and objectively bad. No ties to the album’s concept or theme.Objectively bad, but at least conveys some information.Pretty bad, but a few redeeming qualities. Related to the music contained therein.So bad it’s good. A train-wreck you can’t look away from.Bad, but enjoyable. Might be a groaner of a pun in there, but ties into the music and the overall concept, as appropriate. Or, if not, is at least not actively ugly.Eye-catching, objectively good, and if it has nothing to do with the album’s theme or concept or what have you, is at least a nice piece of art.An objectively good image that conveys a message that relates to and enhances enjoyment of the music contained therein.An objectively good image that conveys a message that relates to and enhances enjoyment and understanding of the music contained therein.An iconic, objectively good image that has some ineffable quality that fits the music so perfectly, you close your eyes while listening to a song from this album and you see this image.Legendary. The songs sound like this image.

This’ll be fun, and I can’t wait to see all of the disagreements I’m sure to get in the comments section. First review coming soon!

This was all supposed to go in Dreamers & Misfits, but the writing process–and book!–were already long enough. Maybe this’ll go into a second edition. In the meantime, snag the book for yourself here.

He Gets It

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Here’s a nice review of Dreamers & Misfits by fan Mark Stansell. It’s always gratifying to see readers who get what you are trying to accomplish with a book. See, Dreamers & Misfits is not about me, and I’m thrilled that Mark’s takeaway has nothing to do with me:

It’s an easy read and as the book progresses, he intersperses comments from the nearly 700 fan responses, sometimes for pages at a time, which are apropos to the subject of the chapter. While I was genuinely honored to see my own comments included, I thought the most touching were those of Mrs. Laura O, who commented,

“We have Neil’s words engraved on our wedding rings, and we used his words when we can’t find how to say it ourselves, RUSH lyrics are our secret code.”

Some fans were more forthcoming it seems, in their responses, and Hellene includes three full fan profiles interspersed through out the book. There are also several interviews in the appendices, and no book about Rush fans would be complete without an interview with Ms. Donna Halper. However, for me the most interesting was that with an Orthodox bishop, the Metropolitan Tikhon Mollard. I found his comments particularly thoughtful and poignant, especially this:

“Ultimately, I think Neil was searching throughout his life for ‘the real relation, the underlying theme.’ For me, those are found in Christ and the Church but for him they are found elsewhere. But the fact that he was searching for answers to those questions reveal him to be a genuinely human person looking for honesty and integrity, which is what we should all strive for.”

Check out the entire review here, as well as Mark’s excellent tribute to Neil Peart. And of course, check out Dreamers & Misfits here.

Put Aside the Alienation

The funny thing about having opinions and expressing them in a public way is that people might comment on them. Or take offense.

As I get more readers coming to this blog, there’s a certain amount of trepidation involving the potential to alienate people with my takes that some may consider to be hot. Or maybe “strident” is the word.

Here’s the thing, though. I am not looking to alienate anyone, but I’m sure it can happen regardless of my intentions. I like to think that I’m at least fair and consistent in my takes on things, and that I’m not making anyone feel unwelcome, but maybe I am. And that’s too bad. But it’s the nature of the beast, I suppose.

I criticize certain things and people and ideas, sure. But usually these are people who’ve come at me first, or ideas and things that have proven to be dishonest, disingenuous, or flat-out lies.

I don’t care who or what anyone is or what label they attach to themselves and their beliefs. My gripes are with liars, the intellectually dishonest, the incurious, those who are setting us on a path of evil.

Luckily, that’s not most people. Most people, even if I disagree with them on one thing or another, aren’t evil. Those kinds of people are the ones I don’t want to alienate. I very often learn from them, and I like to hope the phenomenon is mutual.

Evil people, though, can go screw.

Moving Pictures, like me, turns 40 this year. It’s also the coolest senses fan favorite. Read more about Rush fans in Dreamers & Misfits, the first deep-dive into Rush fandom.

Pics Or It Didn’t Happen

Everything is taken on faith. Ancient history is taken on faith. Yesterday’s events are taken on faith. We have to have faith in the people who recorded things, especially in the pre-photograph and video camera age. But even now, when those things can be so easily manipulable, we have to take them on faith too. So few things are certain, aside from sources we know personally and can trust.

I mean, our family histories are taken on faith.

The argument against God that “You can’t prove a man walked on water” is so weak it doesn’t even seem worth spilling ink over, but I’m cranky so let’s roll with it. It’s like saying “Pics from thousands of years ago, or it didn’t happen.”

Somebody actually said this to me.

First, no Christian argues a man walked on water. Jesus is Lord. It was God who walked on water, among other miracles.

Second, you can’t prove Socrates existed. Or that the Big Bang actually happened. Or that we evolved from monkeys. And so on. Why is a man walking on water so preposterous, yet “All the matter in the universe was concentrated in an area the size of a teaspoon for no reason at all, and then it exploded and stuff crashed into each other and all life was created for no reason whatsoever” accepted as fact. Because let me tell you, that’s preposterous.

You can’t prove we emerged from nothingness by random happenstance of billions and billions of probabilities that just happened to turn out perfectly. It’s a miracle!

. . . but nobody was there to see. And we have background radiation, sure, and what appears to be an expanding universe. But we don’t actually know if it’s infinite. Or why any of this is happening. We have best guesses based on available evidence. But some of the theories about it are laughable. I mean, no one was there. You can’t prove it happened that way.

Everything is taken on faith. And I’ll believe the words of people who claimed to see something, wrote it down, and then were murdered for their beliefs over internet fedora-tippers with the logical skills and intellect of yesterday’s bowel movement any day.

And let’s not even get started on “I’m not personally convinced by the evidence you cited. Therefore, it’s not evidence” canard or this post will be 450,000 words long.

Books or it didn’t happen:

“If You Fight Back, You Lose”

Gina Carano always seemed like a cool lady by all accounts, very pleasant, or as pleasant as someone who pounds the hell out of other women for a living can be. After her turn to acting, Carano still came across as likable and the type to largely keep her personal life private, including her politics. This helped considering Carano has up until recently been one of the stars of the Disney+ TV show, The Mandolorian.

That has changed fairly recently, as she began to offer posts on various social media platforms mildly critical of the prevailing political pieties of the day. This caused considerable consternation among the weird and childish emotionally incontinent men and women who make up Star Wars fandom. The last straw was, depending on who you ask, Carano refusing to put her pronouns in her Twitter bio (and rather humorously putting “beep/bop/boop,” as in robot sounds), posting an “Epstein didn’t kill himself” meme that is admittedly rather old, or sharing another post about political persecution that made the mistake of Referencing The Holocaust While Right-Wing.” For these reasons, she has been called “abhorrent” by everyone–seriously, these zombie NPCs all have the same programming–and fired. 

And boy, if Gina Carano is considered “far-right,” wait until these weirdos see some real far-right memes.

Fans of things like the freedom to express opinions that aren’t dictated by the fanatical progressive death cult that rules us expressed their anger about cancel culture and responded by canceling Disney+. To which conservative and libertarin idiots responded by calling them “hypocrites” for “canceling” while being against “cancel culture.”

No, I’m not making this up. 

These people are either just this stupid……or are controlled opposition.

Apparently, playing to win means your enemy wins. And that the true conservative thing to do would be to actually give your enemy more money, and not less, to protest them cancelling somebody for their benign political opinions. 

No wonder the mainstream American right (which is actually a subset of the left and isn’t even “right-wing”) loses all the time. Worse, there is no infrastructure ready to immediately hire Ms. Carano and give her an acting job. Because American conservatives long ago abandoned the arts and culture in the idiotic belief that economic arguments actually work.

No. Moral arguments work. They always have and they always will. You don’t counter a hostile religion by talking about money. Unless, of course, you’re not really serious about fighting back because you accept the enemy’s morality.

I have been mildly chastised for calling the right “incompetent” for not having the infrastructure in place to give Ms. Carano a new job, and that’s fair though a slight misunderstanding. I was not saying that the American right is incompetent with regards to lacking the competence to set up movie production companies. I meant incompetent in the sense of engaging with the arts as a whole. They’re incompetent fighters because they have conceded this key battleground to the enemy without a fight. Much like they’ve done with education, labor unions, and so on.

The point is this: We are in this predicament because we’ve relied on so-called leaders to do the heavy lifting for us, when they’ve actually been doing heavy grifting. Start smaller. As an addition to my post outlining practical steps to fight back against the enemy’s culture, I will add this: Hire those who have been fired for their political opinions whenever the chance arrives.

You notice how evil progressive weirdos always seem to fail upwards and never face true joblessness? Do the same. Give a guy a job and ignore any blowback. These freaks have short memories anyway. Screw them. Hire our own and stop shunning them.

Our biggest enemy isn’t the progressive death cult. It’s the institutional right who have poisoned us with these stupid beliefs that paralyze us and keep us from taking any action that actually works. Ignore their admonitions that you “stoop to the enemy’s level” when you fight back, or you “become what you hate.” Ask them what they’ve conserved and then ignore their horrible advice, which essentially boils down to “If you fight back, your enemy wins.” Let them sniff their own self-righteous farts all by their lonesome. 

UPDATE: Apparently someone actually is serious about providing an alternative and has hired Ms. Carano:

EXCLUSIVE: Less than 24 hours after her explosive ouster from Star Wars series The Mandalorian for incendiary social media posts, Gina Carano has hit back at her detractors and revealed a new movie project she is making with conservative website The Daily Wire.

Carano told us today: “The Daily Wire is helping make one of my dreams — to develop and produce my own film — come true. I cried out and my prayer was answered. I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob. I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before, and I hope it inspires others to do the same. They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them.”

In don’t like Ben Shapiro, but credit where credits due. I hope this works out for her.

Some independent art for you right here:

More Questions Deserving Answers

To what extent should I be sad that a disgusting degenerate who helped ruin American culture in the guise of “free speech” (itself another bad American joke), and to what extent should I be glad that an unrepentantly wicked stain of a human being is gone from this Earth?

Because I am having a difficult time not celebrating this man’s death.

Doers and Whiners

I’m pretty burnt out on diagnosing problems and lamenting them. We all know about the state of our culture and the state of our world. I’m more interested in what to do about it. So many ruminations about “What do we do?” are long on generalities and complaints and short on specifics and positive leadership. So allow me to throw my hat into the ring here. Some of this is stuff I’ve said before on this blog, some of it is new, but I’ll put it all here in one place:

For Creators:

You have to get your stuff out there. This is the bottom line, number one piece of actionable advice. Stop aspiring and start doing. It can start small: enter a songwriting competition, send a short story to a magazine, or just put stuff out on your own. But if you’re not in the arena, you’re really missing out.Don’t be cringe. No Ben Shapiro-level embarrassing self-insert fan-fiction slathered with corny “hot button” topical political issues. But there’s more to it than just “Tell a good story” or “Make a good product.” You have to, as Brian Neimeier perfectly puts it, show the characters in your story who embody the values you are trying to inculcate succeeding. This doesn’t mean they have to be perfect, boring Mary Sues. But maybe they survive at the end.Continually improve. If we’re going to avoid the gatekeepers, we need another type of quality check on our work. So seek out honest feedback with an eye towards your improvement. In a world where literally anybody can publish a book, and absent a network of editors and tastemakers and other people devoted to putting forth a certain culture and aesthetic, this is a must.Be a part of a community. Like-minded creators need networks for new ideas and the aforementioned continual improvement. Don’t be shy about hopping on message boards or social media or anything else in order to meet people like you. All you have to do is ask for help, and the worst that anyone can tell you is no, they’re busy.

For Fans:

Give up mainstream IPs. They’re dead. They’re never coming back. Stop devoting time and money to Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, D&D, etc. They suck and they’re not for you anymore.Support monetarily or spread the word. This is a sort of corollary to the above point. If you lament the sad state of corporate IP, yet still spend money on it while ignoring other stuff that’s not owned by people who hate you, you’re a part of the problem. Throw a few bucks an independent creators’ way, buy a book or a CD, support a crowdfund, or just spread the word. A lot of people do this, which is awesome, but we need more. How do I know? Because I still see conservative dorks whining online about “The right has no culture” and so on. What buffoons. No wonder they always lose. “Right” and “Left” are dead terms anyway, vestigial appendages we still use because we don’t have a new agreed-upon vocabulary yet.Start a network. Be the cultural curator or patron you want to see. Not an author or programmer or developer or artist or musician or filmmaker? Fine. Set up a website reviewing new stuff, interview people, curate alternative culture, whatever. As with the reality that anyone can publish a book, anyone can publish a website. Go for it!

At the end of the day, you’re either a doer or a whiner. And whiners accomplish nothing.

For the fans:

Signal Boost: Planetary Anthology: Saturn

The thrilling Planetary Anthology series of sci-fi short stories comes to a conclusion with Saturn, out now! A whole host of great authors like C.S. Johnson, Karl Gallagher, A.M. Freeman, Ben Wheeler, and James Pyles, among others conspire to being fantastic fiction based upon our sixth planet:

Saturn. The Ringed Planet. Harbinger of ideas and wonder. The planet that gave birth to the modern era of science envisioning the myriad of multi-colored rings circling the planet, one of the reasons for the invention of the telescope and the second largest in our solar system. These are the stories of Saturn, the great Titan. Tales of time, age and endings.

Buy it here!

My science-fiction series The Swordbringer takes place on a made up planet, but it has rings like Saturn. Buy it here!

Everybody’s Expecting the Spanish Inquisition

Writer and everybody’s favorite Italian Alaric Hart touched upon an essential truth about so much current fantasy, and enough sci-fi for it to be noticeable:

I cannot stand the Inquisition trope in fantasy. Not because of some reference to real history or anything related, but just because it's always the same thing applied to "different" worlds. I'm tired of this

— Alric Hart (@AlricHartWriter) February 2, 2021

This isn’t solely about the Inquisition, but the Inquisition is a good discussion point.

Too often we see fantasy fiction that’s just 21st century American cultural pieties grafted onto a fantastical setting. The end result is anachronistic and boring.

I personally want to see things I’ve never seen before, imaginative situations, and some excitement. I don’t need a lecture about low organized region (i.e., thinly veiled Christianity is bad) based upon a version of some actual historical event, but with dwarves or whatever, because I’ve been hearing this story for forty years. Just because you have elves and magic doesn’t make the message any less tedious.

This brings us to a fundamental skill of the writer: the ability to create characters who think differently than the writer themself, and who are actually believable. Too many solipsistic and narcissistic writers get bound up in anybody thinking someone with the wrong opinion could actually reflect their thoughts, so they make every good guy a self-insert who shares their personal beliefs, while the bad guys, or characters we’re at least not supposed to root for, are cartoony and lame.

Before you accuse me of creating a straw man here, I’d like to remind you that I’ve read John Scalzi.

Why not a fantasy world where an inquisition is necessary and good? Or one where, I don’t know, pick your hot-button issue. It’s gotten to the point where you know where any fantasy story with a historical analogue, but with gnomes, is going to go once you realize what the historical analogue is.

How about a fantasy where the Catholic Church analogue isn’t the evil hypocritical bad guy? You know, just to shake things to a bit.

One area where The Hunger Games succeeded, even though I found it unsatisfying, is that the rebels weren’t portrayed as these morally pure paragons.

That’s a different take than the standard underdog = perfect trope we see over and over and over. Complexity and ambiguity aren’t de facto bad things. Sometimes they can be used to explore complex issues.

So why couldn’t an inquisition be a positive thing in a fantasy story?

> be in a fantasy world
> sorcerers can summon demons and wipe out entire cities
> get family and whole village killed by a sorcerer
> join the Inquisition to prevent this happening again
> use force against people with no morals
> "you're the bad guy"

— Alric Hart (@AlricHartWriter) February 2, 2021

Alric nails it.

If I know where a story is going–and am right about it–100 percent of the time, it’s boring.

I run the risk of hypocrisy accusations coming my way when I write posts like this, but I think while my Swordbringer series has Christian protagonists, the issues I raise and how I deal with them–including those of the villains–go where you might not expect them. Check it out here.

Physical Media Rules

GameStop-mania got me thinking about how much physical media rules (among other things). But the news wasn’t the only thing that got me on this train of thought lately.

My son found a bunch of my old video game stuff in the basement, games and manuals, mostly old PlayStation, Game Boy, and DS games. My son was as enchanted with old game manuals as much as I am. There was something about opening a game box and getting a lavishly illustrated manual that took time and detail to not only tell you how to play the game, but to give tidbits about the story that could actually help you out.

I’ll never forget when my friend Danny and I were playing StarTropics on the Nintendo when we were eight or nine, and actually had to dip the letter from the main character Mike’s uncle to Mike that came with the game into water to reveal a secret code needed to advance in the actual game. Or using the manual to old Sierra adventure games to progress, like the spell recipies and incantations in King’s Quest III or proper police procedure in the original Police Quest. Or the strategy guide and map that came with the original Final Fantasy. Or the care and humor that went into every Quest for Glory manual (along with the really nice paper they were printed on!). Or the sheer whimsy and attention to detail in every old Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest or The Legend of Zelda manual.

You get the point. It’s such a shame that games don’t come with manuals anymore and just have in-game tutorials or tell you to just look online.

Having a thing is fun. I’m like that with music and books. Though downloading albums and books onto a Kindle or other device is convenient and often cheaper, album and book artwork and a physical, tangible thing can’t be replaced. Someone took the time to put these songs in this order for you, and include this imagery on the cover and interior of the disc, along with photographs and maybe lyrics. A book had this cover for a reason.

These things enhance the experience more than faster download times. They also make the creative work you are about to enjoy feel real.

More than that, it prevents the powers that be from deleting parts or wholes of things that become objectionable as fashionable morality changes. History is hard to rewrite when there are pristine copies of a thing safe from digital manipulation. 

Remember when the hippies were worried about Christians to erase problematic content?

I’ve discussed how I still enjoy buying CDs and listening to them when I can. Truth be told, if all of my CDs weren’t still in unorganized boxes in the basement, I’d use them instead of my trusty over-a-decade-old iPod that has the vast bulk of my music on it. 

I still prefer to purchase physical copies of any video games over digital downloads for this reason, and one of these days I’ll buy all of the books I’ve downloaded on my Kindle that I deem worthy to be in my personal library (coming soon!).

The GameStop situation, along with that of AMC, has a relatively unreported dimension: the soullessness of modern culture as we march deeper into the 21st century has unearthed a powerful nostalgia for–wait for it–big box retailers and mall culture.

Would anyone ever have guessed that people would pine for the days when you actually had to go to a store instead of the convenience of purchasing something ephemeral with a click? I thought about this during a recent visit to GameStop with my son, and another to our fantastic local comic store/”pop culture emporium,” the interior of which is the featured image of this post. At a store, you can browse for things you my not have heard of before, or weren’t necessarily looking for, and discover new stuff by accident. Maybe it’s overhearing another customer speaking, or people working at the store, and asking them what they think of this album or that book or game. Maybe you bump into a friend. Maybe you make a friend. 

Who knows? The fact is, you cannot do this stuff online. Internet relationships have potential to be strong, but there is no substitute for the connections made in real life, making the effort to actually go hang out with other human beings the way my generation still did until the advent of the Internet in our late teens and early twenties.

So-called “mall culture” and the big box retailers were derided at the time for replacing the local mom n’ pop whatever and other characteristic community retailers in place of a homogenous, bland corporate culture. And that is still a valid criticism. But compared to what we have now, the “bland corporate culture” of the late 1990s/early 2000s seems like a shining beacon of community to subsequent generations raised on nothing but being Very OnLine Youth.

And these criticisms also neglect the fact that actual communities and cultures were still allowed to develop when the shopping mall was a safe place to hang out and do things outside of adult supervision and hadn’t been turned into decaying warzones or places where that sort of discovery and freedom are discouraged. How many malls have arcades anymore, for example? They’re usually full of relatively high-end stores that smell like lots and lots of expensive perfume.

Does any of this have anything to do with r/WallStreetBets’s attempted takedown of big hedge funds? I don’t know. Maybe. Perhaps there was some residual anger at the hedge funds’ decision to short these particular stocks. I haven’t researched the issue myself, but it’s interesting to think about, especially as my own son finds himself really enjoying products of the past, not due to any sense of personal nostalgia, but because those products are just really good.

Naturally, the counterargument is “Not everything from the past was good, and not everything from the present is bad.” And that is absolutely correct! But in a culture where everything is increasingly revealed to be utterly fake, human connection is one of the last remaining bastions of realness around in the physical world we all live in, regardless of one’s spiritual beliefs. It does my heart proud to see my son enjoy just walking through shelves of books or games or anything else and enjoy the experience of looking around and talking to other people who share his interests. 

Physical media rules. 

Feel free to buy physical copies of my books. Check out those amazing covers!