Because I am a ROCKET MAN...

That really is a great song, don't underestimate it, and it captures such a perfectly unique mood (lyrics to prove the claim, more or less). The rocket man, filled with superhuman power, stranded so far from home in a place, cold as hell, with a mix of optimism and pessimism, resignation and hope, he strides boldly into the long night, and it will take him a long, long time to get back. Kudos to you Elton John, Kudos.

Highly distractible, but nigh industructable

While the latter may or may not be true (time will tell if I am nigh industructable), I certainly am highly distractible, especially when I'm in still a semi-vacationish mode. In fact I'm right now more distractible than I was while I was in full-vactionish mode. Alac, Alac, Alac.

So anyways:

Here's some tunes:

LISTEN!!!!

1. Devil's Haircut - Beck - From the album Odelay - Weird, weird, weird song. The free association lyrics, the nonsensical constant refrain, it's all madness really it is, and I truly doubt there's a straight forward understanding one's supposed to get from all of it (although there are claims of a straight forward meaning to it on the internet, even one by Bob Dylan, but even if Beck were to tell me himself, I'd be like dude, whatever it's supposed to say, it's not saying that in a fashion that anyone should be expected to directly understand). But if I were to guess, and I am inclined to, I'd probably say it's all madness. The lyrics recite a list of crazy bad (eyes ripped from sockets!) stuff happening with the repeated line my mind is fadin', but the tone is all detached, not quite cheerfully so but with a bit of almost amusement, maybe fascination or interest. Then at the end you get an intensity to the voice and something like rage but perhaps more akin to adrenaline rush. Maybe it's all just madness. Least that's how I'm thinkin' of it.

Lyrics

Beck's Music Video - Beck's not one to shy away from the weird is he?

Devil's Haircut AMV - tv show : The Tick - Made by (since making good AMV's takes good work, I've decided to start crediting the AMV makers, in this case an outfit called:) Brilliantwerk (the guy seems to be in a lot of online communities, although I checked the website at the end of the video and that goes no where (the link here goes to his (or could be her) youTube site)) - Now really the whole reason I took this song is because I found this AMV and since I'm using in my title nigh industructable I had to include some Tickige. But the song and the video are actually a really nice match since both are slightly off-kilter in a weird direction. Moreover, by starting and ending with the bomber dude, the video manages to match the tone of the song which isn't quite as cheery as the Tick himself and his cry of "Spoooooooon!"

2. Parallel Universe - Red Hot Chili Peppers - From the album Californication - Some semi-Transendentalist mystic mombo-jumbo (also see the mention of Oversoul in By the Way) + rockin' triumphantcy + Red Hot Chili Peppers = Awesome, awesome song. Few songs are this intense and this triumphant. That made it easy to tweak into my own version which I called Dravidian King, as a song it might be less than great, but as a webpost session it has the spontaneity, emotionalism, etc., let's not go into webpost theory right now, let's not go into music theory right now either, let's just rock out with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Lyrics - For a long time I didn't realize it was California King, I don't remember what I thought it was, but California King is that lyric that's just spit out full force in the refrain, and we all know California likes to rock triumphant

Red Hot Chili Peppers Concert Video - There's no music video for this song, but this is a pretty nice concert video, all the way from the good folk in Brazil.

Parallel Universe AMV - anime : Kiddy Grade - Made by Charles Fontillas - I'm not a big fan of the anime Kiddy Grade, but this AMV is pretty awesome. It's as energized, colorful, and full of life as the song, plus it even captures the Red Hot Chili Peppers psychedelic flavors. The characters are nicely trotted out but not idolized or fan-serviced, the action is brisk but does not detract from the song, etc., overall very great. A nice comparison would be to another AMV of Parallel Universe, this one made with Gunslinger Girl (an anime I haven't seen much of, but which seems pretentious). The second AMV isn't bad but it isn't as good as the first, the whole video is too static, both in subject and shot, and even when there is action, the scene itself is focused on, dragged down the momentum of the video. Admittedly I might think this way due to my biases towards Gunslinger Girl, but then again I'm no fan of Kiddy Grade, then again... then again, it's time to move on to our next contender (for no prize, title or position what-so-ever!!!! (Wooo, what-so-ever!!!!)).

3. Bad Reputation - by Thin Lizzy, but covered more famously by Joan Jett - From the album Bad Reputation - This is a punk shout, so I'm not going into much detail about it. Especially since I did go into more detail about it before in a previous session. So let me just say:

I DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT MY BAD REPUTATION!!!!!!!!!!!

Here are the Lyrics

Here's Joan Jett's Music Video.

And here's an AMV of Bad Reputation using for the anime the 3rd Series of Digimon focusing on everyone's favorite bad-asses Rika and Renamon (made more subject-worthy by the fact Rika, despite loving her bad-assness, was worried about her mother's reaction for parts of the series). Digimon rules!!!!! (actually I wasn't thrilled with the 4th series and I haven't seen the 5th one, and the 2nd one, while good wasn't as good as the 1st or the 3rd ones.)

Just to cap things off to an off-form entry, let me point you towards the intro credits of Freaks and Geeks which featured Bad Reputation, since Freaks and Geeks was awesome.

4. Saturday Night's Alright - by Elton John - From the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - You know when you look at craftsmanship, some of these older rockers who now have turned into adult contemporary staples, used to be real rock craftsmen. Now I'm all for raw power, but there's also something to be said for craftsmanship, and Mr. Elton John says it well.

Lyrics

A concert video with Elton John

Saturday Night's Alright AMV - (note: the song here is actually covered by Nickleback and Kid Rock)- anime : Love Hina - Made by CrashOverRide83m - A splendid little AMV I must say. Fast as the wind through the lyrics, nice imagery, over-the-top action on the video front to match the over-the-top energy in the song as well as the exuberant embrace of fighting, also nice that the fan-service implications of Love Hina play well with the date connotations of Saturday Night. So overall, a well crafted piece, Mr. Elton John could have probably done better, but that doesn't detract from the fact that this AMV was done very well.

So usually I do 5 songs, but usually I'm not this tired, and even usually the 5th song gets a little bit of the shaft when I'm writing it up and everything. So for now I'm only doing 4 songs, and I might actually make that a new policy. Perhaps. PERHAPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

Saturday morning's alright for posting

Welcome to a special Saturday morning edition (I mean morning only loosely since it was around 11 AM when I started this and it is undoubtably after noon when this is actually going up (and you foreign folks have completely different time zones to boot)) of the Rand Show!

(I've always had mixed feelings about calling this the Rand Show in the post itself, I feel it takes away a bit of the personal feel of the webpost, but on the other hand it gives the whole thing an aura of coolness and a more professional feel, ah the constant war between professionalism and personalism, when will we all just learn to get along?)

For those of you in the know, the session's title is a reference to Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting (in addition to linking you up to the lyrics via the title, I'm also hitting you up a video on youTube (why? Because I'm just too awesome (also it's a pretty cool song)). By the way, booh-ya to my little bro's awesomeness with his academics and SAT's. Not only is it good for him but it's one more person I can leech off of when I'm a crazy unemployed writer. Also shout out to my little sis and her mad nursing-student skills.

(That leads me to a little thought about the WGA (Writer's Guild of America, the union for Hollywood writers, excluding reality shows and animated shows, but including game shows and talk shows) strike that I've been trying to get in but haven't found a good place for it:

I'm of two minds when it comes to this strike, on the one hand, it seems like it's mainly for the benefit of employed writers or writers who regularly have jobs, who are actually doing immensely well (better than the national average or even median), while 1/2 of the current union members are unemployed (although the striker's points, like residuals do benefit unemployed workers who once had jobs, I'm unsure how much it'll help people who have had very few and minor jobs who are breaking into the business, who I think are a significant minority if not the majority of the guild), when you have a situation like that it seems like you need to lessen salary demands to allow for more employment, so in that sense I'm against the strike. But on the other hand, it makes some sense for the writer's contracts to be adjusted for new technologies like downloading, and I realize this might prompt a massive renegotiation with other guilds, like the actor's guild and the director's guild, these renegotiations again make sense with new tech. So those are my thoughts on the matter, do with them what you will).

If you've noticed that this session seems unfocused, well I'm okay with that. I know I've sometimes chastised myself for bad sessions before which have often been unfocused but usually the problem with those is they were unfocused on topics that were lame or explored lamely and/or they were supposed to be focused but ended up not being focused.

A tendency of mine with unfocused sessions is to concentrate solely on stuff I'm doing for my webpost. I'm trying not to do a sole focus on that, but I tend to follow the wandering of my thoughts when I'm unfocused and as I'm working on my webpost, my thoughts often turn to that. So I'll try not to be exclusively me/webpost focused here (I'm thinking it might kind of late to talk about this since I'm already several paragraphs in). But on the matter of the webpost, you're all bums for not adding comments, but it might just be that's because there are so few of you.

I've often sat weary wondering whether to continue this, but my mind has always been cheered up by the idea that I have many viewers, however after carefully examining my sitemeter account I'm more skeptical. I'm hesitant to actually blame Sitemeter since most likely I simply have been using it badly, but before when I looked at it I assumed that the visit count did not include me, however... well, that significantly chops my visit count down and it also means my visit length statistic (which I'm really not sure how it works since when I examine the details of it, almost everyone comes up as visiting for 0:00, when at least some of them I know should be higher) is inflated by my own staring at my greatness. Overall, I'm concluding that I'm not sure how Sitemeter works and need to take its statistics with a grain of salt, but overall it indicates that not that many people are visiting my blogspot account. On the brighter side I still seem to get a high view count from my MySpace account, but I was hoping that I could one day discontinue that, but it seems that's not the case. So, in conclusion, I really don't know how many people read my webpost, but it's most likely some but not that many (also, according to Sitemeter, which again I'm not sure if I'm reading it right, I apparently have readers in India, Argentina, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Estonia, again I'm not sure how many of those may have simply just visited for five seconds, but a shoutout to my foreign readers!)

Enough shop-talk, well, almost enough shop-talk. I'm hoping that once my finals are over, I can start pumping this site up via more links, getting more into the webpost community, getting into the youTube community, and good old-fashioned commercialism. For those of you that hate commercialism in any way shape or form, let me say first of all, I'm almost certainly not going to change what I'm writing to fit a commercial generating mold, by commercialism I mainly mean I'm going to try to get money from this webpost (and hopefully pump some of that money into improving my much-neglected website and this webpost itself). If I do make any changes for commercial reasons, the only thing I might do is narrow this webpost's focus to fit into a specialized niche, but that's a big MIGHT, and would almost be a probably not.

But let me hit up commercialism for a sec. I might do a full session on this later on, but I want to give a little defense of commercialism. First, let me refer you to Jimmy James' brilliant defense of advertising. Second, let me say that commercialism can be bad when it means that artists reduce the quality of their work to make cash or please their financiers. However, if extra cash allows artists to keep on producing great work, than that isn't a problem, heck, even if the commercialism dictates the general direction of the artists work that doesn't mean the stuff is bad. After all, it was commercial interests that drove the production of tv shows derived from toys and while I'll freely admit many of those shows were bad, and many were dumbed down (less for the sake of the toys than for the low expectations of tv producers about kids), we still got awesome shows like Transformers, GI Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (although this actually originated with self-produced rather indie comic books, but I think the funding for the TV show was largely based on toys sale expectations), and even Neon Genesis Evangelion! I could go on on this topic, but I'm not going to since this whole post is getting immense. So just let me say, if I do get commercial on you guys, don't expect any less awesomeness, because that's just not how I roll.

Anywho, like I said this session is getting massive, and since it is unfocused I can't really justify any more massiveness, thus I'm going to wrap things up and if you're really lucky (and if you're all good boys and girls) I might make another session later tonight, or maybe even do a rare Sunday session. So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!