In lieu of a piece with singular vision this week, here’s a few smaller vignettes…
Rocket From The Crypt’s Group Sounds turns 20
Someone in the Swamiverse (Tim? Pat? Alan?) alerted me on Tuesday that it was the 20th anniversary of the release of Rocket From The Crypt’s classic Group Sounds. Picking a favorite RFTC record is like picking a favorite ice-cream flavor, i.e. a thankless, pointless and impossible task in which there are no bad choices. That said, if you forced me to choose at gun point I might just choose Group Sounds.
I wrote somewhere in the past, I think on the swami records forum, (RIP), that Group Sounds is the correct name for this record, because by intertwining the various musical strands than run through RFTC: punk, garage, rocknroll, R&B, etc, it pulls together everything there is to love about this group. Play White Belt loud and dare yourself to find another song with such an incendiary and relentless energy.
I’m low-key obsessed with multiverse theory and Group Sounds offers up a potential inflection point in which our universe breaks into another…a universe in which Jon Wurster becomes the full-time Rocket From The Crypt drummer. Potential knock on effects: does Mario end up playing drums in Hot Snakes if he isn’t in RFTC first? Does John Reis somehow bleed into the Best Show universe? Does Live From Camp X-Ray have a very different sound? Do I ever see an RFTC show with this lineup? And so many more questions we don’t have time for! As you might be able to tell, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.
I can’t believe this album is 20 years old, not for the usual “fuck me, I’m getting old” reasons, but because it still feels so fresh and so vibrant. A timeless record from the greatest band of all time. As Speedo would say…CRANK IT AND SPANK IT.
Book Nook: Raised in Captivity by Chuck Klosterman
Somewhere in the Twenty-Teens, I lost the ability to read books. My attention span got short-circuited. Too much Twitter? Probably. Driving to work instead of taking transit? Definitely.
Over the last year, I was determined to make an effort to fix this, and I’ve been seeing some success. On the path back to again becoming a reader, one helpful step was non-fiction. Another was short stories.
Unsurprisingly, a collection of short stories badged as ‘fictional non-fiction’ seemed perfectly placed to meet my needs. (Fictional non-fiction, as it turns out, is mostly just a fun way to say magical realism.)
Interestingly, Klosterman has said this is his most personal work - and he’s written memoirs, so that’s an interesting claim - because this an insight into the kind of daydreams he has when he’s alone. All I can say is that his daydreams are much more interesting than mine, which mostly revolve around sandwiches and Rocket From The Crypt related multiverses.
The stories here are mostly extra-short stories covering only 8-10 pages. As with all short story collections, some are better than others. I think my favorite was the one about a middle-child trying to hold together both his siblings, and their work successfully operating a cult. Or maybe the one about a government worker whose reality fractures when he is introduced to a secret program that monitors the probability of three types of coin tosses.
Most of these stories are the mere kernel of a larger good idea, but the concept is really fun and almost no one is better placed to pull it off than Klosterman.
(Bonus Recommendation: After working my way up to it, I finally read a full length novel a month back. It was Angels by Denis Johnson, a truly disturbing and haunting but excellent read.)
Maybe the real explosions are the friends we make along the way?
In the What is Negative Progression post, I wrote this: “…I truly believe that professional wrestling is a completely unique genre of entertainment, capable of rare moments of brilliance that, when achieved, few other genres can match. Except, it almost never achieves that brilliance...” This week, we have (yet another) example of a near-miss at said brilliance.
Have you ever had the kind of bad day at work, where you did everything right but someone else dropped the ball and you end up as the person representing the failure?
That is what happened at Sunday’s All Elite Wrestling (AEW) show Revolution. A failure to use big enough explosions left wrestlers Jon Moxley and Eddie Kingston looking more than a little foolish for the big finale of the EXPLODING BARBED WIRE DEATH MATCH that Moxley and Kenny Omega had just competed in.
The exploding ring concept dates to early-90s Japan and the only previous attempt of note in the US bombed (pun very much intended.) The single key to success for AEW was to not screw up the big explosions at the end, which of course they did. In retrospect, it seems obvious that they should have taped this match in advance, rather than performing it live, which would have given them the chance to either take a mulligan on the explosions or reshoot the performers reaction to them.
Here’s what you want this moment to look like:
And here’s what they delivered:
Disclaimer: those are random tweets that I searched for. I don’t follow either account and am hoping neither is a twitter weirdo or creep.
And, as suggested in that second tweet (albeit with a little less hyperbole), the bummer here is that the story that AEW have told, over the course of months, was genuinely excellent. Kingston trying to save his old friend/recent enemy from being blown up had a ton of emotional heft to it if you’ve followed their stories. The failure to launch very much let down the performers, who of course were the ones left lying in front of a crowd that was booing their big moment.
I like to picture Moxley and Kingston after the show, yelling at whoever screwed up the explosions, kinda like the Air Boss from Top Gun: “I want some butts!!”
*****
To switch gears, so as not to be a part of the legion of wrestling fans who focus exclusively on the negatives…on Sunday’s show AEW did deliver something fans wanted: the US TV debut of Maki Itoh.
Itoh is a former J-Pop singer, who turned to wrestling after she was fired from her group for being either too unpopular or too ugly, depending on who translated the story from Japanese into English. If that origin story in itself isn’t enough to get people onboard (and it should be), she is also the self-proclaimed “cutest girl in the world”, “queen of the simps”, and is a gloriously potty-mouthed tweeter. She has the exact kind of weirdo charisma that should be perfect for American pro-wrestling.
If she’s not a big star in the US wrestling world by the end of the year, that’ll be a bigger dud than any botched explosion could ever be.
Finally, to commemorate spending 1 year being Safer at Home
Shout out to all the partners, spouses, room-mates, siblings, whomever that we all lived with in such close quarters for the last year. Extra kudos to the people who don’t live with a ‘life-partner’, because they didn’t exactly sign up for this shit in quite the same way that us married folks did. Knowing ones major faults and attempting to minimize them seems to be the best strategy? To whit, I share with you this graphic that Nic made, which accurately describes what to expect me to be doing at any given moment: