Diskage:
DVD • Brotherhood of the Wolf
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Player
• Audioslave - Audioslave
• Slayer - South of Heaven
• NIN - The Fragile
• NIN - Broken
• Tool - Undertow

Books Lying Open
• The Angel of Darkness, Caleb Carr

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Recriminations.

When I Grow Up:
• I will sleep in.

Curse of the Day:
• May you fail to find joy in the sporting event of the year.

I didn't surf any (productively) Sunday, and I'm not in the mood now, so I'll just make stuff up, and throw up some things I've meant to in recent days.

In theory I'd have a lot to write about, having attended the Superbowl yesterday, even if I was just there in a menial/working mode.  However there is really nothing interesting to talk about, even with my first hand knowledge. It was like any other football game, one of well over one hundred I've worked at there over the years. Just a slightly larger but much less enthusiastic crowd.  The biggest difference was the ridiculous glut of security people.  Every aisle had two ushers, there were hundreds of rent a cops walking around, and hundreds more in uniform cops, and I'm sure that many more plain clothes cops and soldiers and god knows what else.

I'm not sure at what point I began to more than subconsciously wish for a terrorist strike of some non-lethal nature.  It wasn't when I had to get off the trolley a stop before the stadium since they weren't allowing employees to disembark at the actual stadium stop.  It wasn't when I had to wait around for 20 minutes to take a shuttle bus (glorified mini-van) into the stadium to get to my work check in.  It wasn't when I had to wait there for almost two hours to get my badge, since the computerized badge/photo processing operation was running like a Russian bread line.  It wasn't when I was still two hours early, due to the ridiculously early check in time, and had nothing to do but sit around inside the rather small vending stand I was working out of, since we weren't allowed to walk around freely.  And it wasn't the fifteen time I had some security guy stop me to check my ID, while I was in the middle of selling laughably-overpriced soda in crappy plastic souvenir cups.

So I can't pick out any particular annoyance that pushed me over the edge, but with the very hot weather, the pushing/milling crowds, and the ridiculously omni-present security, by the time famously semi-talented Canadian Shania Twain, or possibly Celine Dion, emerged to sing the US National Anthem, I was quite hopeful that some high explosives would make the cement run with the blood of the infidels.

Tragically, nothing of the kind happened, unless you count the self-mutilation of horrified Raiders fans.

I will ring my own bell lightly, since yesterday's eventual prediction of a Tampa blow out proved quite accurate.

No one ever goes out on a limb to predict a blow out in the playoffs, but so often that's what the games turn into, so I'm hedging towards that.  Okay, 34-20 Tampa.  With at least one defensive touchdown for them.

Oakland is all pass, and almost all finesse, and if they get beat up they are screwed.  They also can't kill much time on their drives, so if they're going 3 and out, or turning it over, their defense is going to be on the field all day and will wear down.  14-10 at the half, and then Tampa pulls away in the 3rd and 4th quarters as the law of averages catches up with Oakland. 

True, the flow of the game didn't go quite as I had anticipated; I thought it would be close in the first half, with Tampa pulling away late.  But I was nearly perfect with my score estimate.  I said 34-20, with at least one defensive TD for them, and it was 34-21 with one defensive TD for Tampa. At least that was the score with under two minutes to go.  Then, seeing that all hope for victory was lost and knowing he'd almost certainly not have a return Superbowl trip, Rich Gannon decided to put himself permanently into the Superbowl record books for most interceptions, and especially most interceptions returned for touchdowns, and chucked two up for grabs in the last 90 seconds, turning my 1 point from perfection pick into something less than enviable.

Isn't that like the Raiders?  Just when you think they're going to cooperate and lose as you said they should, they find a way to fuck even that up.

My favorite joke at halftime (delivered to several co-workers and a couple of Tampa fans as they were buying soda from me... not delivered to any Raider fans, since security or not, those fuckers pack knives) was to wonder if Al Davis had raced down to the Tampa locker room yet with a check for $8m, begging them to give him his coach back.

Oh well, no Vince Lombardi trophy for Al, but hey, $8m will buy a lot of ugly nylon jogging suits.

I got home just after dark with sore feet and a pounding headache, and after a quick shower I put the fan in the bedroom window since it was like 84 in my living room, and laid down for a bit.  Predictably enough, my ten minute lie down became a two hours nap.  That gave me a bit energy boost though, and here it is 6am the next day, and I'm not even tired yet.

*head crashes into the keyboard with "zzzzz" sound effect*

No really, I'm wide awake.  I can drive all night.  We don't need to stop yet, honey.

Anyway, once I'd napped I had some dinner and took a couple of Advil, since my head was still throbbing, and then I watched the game, with judicious use of the fast forward button.  I couldn't be arsed to pay attention to the commercials, and most of them were ones I'd seen already, judging by what I saw of them at high speed.  All that "amazing Superbowl commercials!" stuff is pretty much bullshit, in my experience.

I did slow to watch the Hulk and Matrix commercials, and thought the Matrix commercial was goddamned awesome.  Some of the CGI was a bit Spiderman-ish, (much less so than the big cartoon Hulk with a big cartoon tank) where it looked like a cartoon inserted into the movie, but at least it was done clearly. Not just a blur of camera movement and red and blue costume, like the dreadfully fake web swinging scenes in Spidey.  Plus Matrix isn't done yet; they're still polishing the effects shots.  The scene of Neo fighting fifty Agent Smiths looked unbelievable though, for the speed and swirling camera and action, and that car chase is going to be amazing.  Hulk didn't do much for me.  It seems like Godzilla in a much smaller scale, basically. I'm sure it's all very sad with Bruce Banner unable to control his inner rages, etc.  But it's still a green guy stomping around a lot.  I don't know anything of the plot, but there's no indication that there is one.  I mean is there a villain or any conflict?  Spiderman had the Goblin in the trailers.  Daredevil shows the hot chick, and Bullseye, and Kingpen in the trailers. Hulk shows... Hulk and a couple of tanks, in the trailers.  Where's the plot?

Some people are creaming over it in the AICN talk back, but I guess they are a lot more interested in the next (second to next?) comic book movie than I am, since nothing I've seen of the Hulk thus far gives me any desire to see the movie. I always thought that was one of the dumbest of the comic books, when I was a kid and read them. I mean he gets angry, smashes shit, and then calms down again.  Rinse and repeat every issue.  I did always love Daredevil comic books though, since he was so different the the bland superhero Batman/Superman type.  DD was blind and a vigilante, and he had cool martial arts weapons.  The trailer for it isn't doing much for me either, since there's no sign of his cool martial arts weapons, and the leaping off of buildings stuff looks ridiculous.  He can't fly, he just has a sort of radar to make up for his blindness.  So how does he fall 80 or 100 feet and bounce off of fire escapes and such?  Even Batman has cool utility belt stuff and swings around, paying at least some attention to the laws of physics.

There was one other commercial I liked, and it was for Budweiser.  I've never thought those football playing horses were very clever.  I mean it's a clever idea, but it's a bit of a one trick pony.  They're horses, they play football even though they don't have any hands or way to carry the ball, etc.  Great.  Amazing.  Crusty-looking western guys make clever comments while watching the imaginary horses play football in the snow.  Great.  Amazing.  It does beat the Bud Bowl, at least.

However the new one was pretty cute, with instant replay going over and over again, seeing if the horse got enough feet in bounds.  Then the camera goes to a wider view, and it's a zebra watching the replay.  That was cute.  I laughed, just seconds after I had groaned, "Oh god, not another 'fucking horses playing football' Bud commercial." It was somewhat ruined by the weak pun at the end:

Cowboy #1: The ref is a jackass.
Cowboy #2: No, I do believe that's a zebra.

But I guess they have to figure someone out there, probably someone who has slurped their weight in Bud on a weekly basis since they were about 17, wouldn't have gotten the joke otherwise.

Anyhow, it was a return to the boring blow out Superbowls that dominated most of the 80's and 90's, and it made you wonder what Tampa could have done if they had a decent offense and offensive play calling, considering that their defense scored 21 of their 48 points.

I'll enjoy next year's Superbowl a lot more, not being there, I can guarantee you.

Anyway, Angel takes place about a year after Alienist, with all the same characters. It's much less interesting initally, and really doesn't get going to any extent until about 150 pages in.

Critics say that often about books, when there is a lot of background info to impart, and that's basically why I'm saying it about this book.  I often don't agree with that criticism, since you need to know the background info or build up for the action or conflict to make any sense or have any importance.  But in Angel, it's still way too long before things get going.

The Alienist starts off with a hell of a bang; a very lurid and gory description of a murder scene, and goes from there at high speed.  Even the long sections of exposition and scientific theory are pretty interesting, since they are all from the perspective of 100 years ago, back when, many things we know of as valuable tools in criminal investigations today, were just being invented and first utilized.  Those sorts of sections are interesting in Angel as well, but they are often familiar after similar things were discussed in Alienist.  And there are fewer of them.

One thing I did notice being much trimmed in Alienist were the "history of famous buildings" lectures.  In Alienist it's almost like a tour guide narrating at times, since every time some new hotel, office building, government building, ship yard, bridge, water tower, etc, is first seen, there is a paragraph or so about when it was constructed, why, and some other interesting tidbit about it.  Generally these things are under construction when seen in the book, and I have no idea if they were all really going up just when the book is set, or (more likely) if they were all built in that general era, and Caleb has just combined the time frame a bit to spice up the narrative. At any rate, there is zero of that sort of thing in Angel, at least not that I noticed.  There is a little bit of discussion of the settling of upstate NY, which is still quite the wild wilderness at the time of this novel, and a courthouse in Saratoga, NY, but I assumed that was entirely fictional, or else a composite of how things were built at the time, since it's not given any special name or reason to be described, other than that they have a trial in it.

My suspicion is that he (the author) got some criticism of too much history of buildings in the first novel, and therefore eliminated that from the second one.  Less of it would have been fine, but I don't think he needed to eliminate it entirely.

To compare Alienist to Angel, I think Alienist is definitely a better book.  Certainly more entertaining to read, and a more compelling plot, with a lot more action and a feeling of racing against the clock.  The ending in Alienist was way over the top and didn't feel tense to me, since everything was in flashback so I knew the principles survived, and suddenly come the very ending, the evil killing madman was no longer the real bad guy/adversary.  The ending felt cheated.

Angel is almost the opposite. It's very slow in the beginning, and most of the middle drags as well, with lots and lots of investigation into the bad guy's recent past and then ancient past.  There is a relatively boring court room section near the end that I didn't hate, but that didn't really do much for me, and then an action finale that was sort of gratifying, but felt tacked on.  Like the logical conclusion of the novel would have been with courts and laws and legal technicalities, but Caleb figured that wouldn't do for dramaticism (he's clearly not any sort of turn of the century John Grisham, since the courtroom stuff is flabby) so he had to figure a way to have a huge fight scene and a shoot out.  I was also disappointed that, like Alienist, there is a absurdly-happy ending.  Not that the ending is absurdly happy, but the fact that it's at all happy is absurd.  Very Hollywood, like in every action movie when the good guy gets his ass kicked the whole time, but somehow is able to win against all the superior bad guys when it really counts. (I'm obviously making this somewhat vague to avoid being a spoiler about it all, though a detailed discussion would be more enlightening.)

Perhaps the biggest difference between Alienist and Angel is in the tone it's told in.  Alienist is narrated by an adult reporter, telling the story years later, while Angel is told by Stevie, who was a major character in the events of both books, but was just 13 years old during them.  Very mature for his age, having been living on the streets and stealing for a living and running with kid gangs since he was 8, but still a kid.

However, he's narrating the book as if he's writing it 25 years later just as Alienist was written by the reporter 25 years later.  Obviously both were written in the 1990's by Caleb Carr, but both books start off with the narrator thinking about the old events, and then explaining why they are now writing them down, and what their circumstances and situation are at the time.  A clever bit is that in the opening of Angel, Stevie talks to the reporter and talks about his book, which is The Alienist, sort of. If it had been a book actually written in about 1920, that is.  The reporter is having no luck getting it published, due to the shockingly graphic and horrible events it details.

Anyway, Caleb Carr does an interesting job putting the narration of this one from Stevie's PoV, and he is consistent with it.  It's from the adult, literate, well-read Stevie, but it is definitely in a different voice than Alienist was.  The problem with this is that Alienist was a much better-written book, in terms of how entertaining and cool the descriptions of things were.  I quoted several funny ones in the two Alienist blogs last week, and I'd like to produce some Angel quote to join them, but there weren't any sections of the book that were funny, and none that caught my eye as being especially well-written.  Nothing crappy, but nothing that stood out as higher quality.  Which was a disappointment, after the stuff in the Alienist.

The thing I found most interesting about both books, and what I unfortunately don't know the historically veracity of, was how the 1896 version of NYC was presented. It's a filthy, corrupt, crime-choked, debauchery, basically.  The kid gangs and bars, very public abuse of every sort of dangerous narcotic, as well as alcohol and cigarettes, gambling, dog fights, crime galore, murder without any punishment, gangs ruling major sections of the city where police fear to tread, and more.

Talking to a friend in Scotland a few days ago, she remarked that while downtown that day, she caught the aftermath of someone being hit and apparently killed by a bus.  No body was sighted, but she came along in time to see a huge blood stain on the street and a street cleaning vehicle out brushing it up.

So just a short time after the accident, there would have been no sign of it at all.  Whoever was hit no doubt had highly-trained emergency medical professionals on the scene in minutes, and they were whisked away to a hospital.  Police would have closed off the scene and kept back onlookers, the evidence of the bus would have been preserved, and once the scene was cleared a street cleaner was summoned promptly to clean up the evidence/mess. Just as things would be done in most every civilized/Western nation on earth, at this time.

I couldn't help but compare that to the descriptions of everyday life in The Alienist and Angel, where there are bodies left to lie where they die, packs of 8 and 10 year olds fighting to the death over a scrap of territory, 13 year old girls and boys working full time as prostitutes, constant deaths and injuries to street cars and horse drawn wagons, and no police to help with anything critical, no ambulances but what you could pay or summon for yourself, hardly any laws against anything, and just a general state of near-anarchy.

And that's how things are in much of the world still, today.  Just that the gangs have Uzis and hand grenades rather than boards with nails through them, and they are smuggling millions of dollars worth of cocaine in their own airplanes, rather than selling rubbing alcohol as beer to people too drunk to know better, and pocketing a few bucks on the difference, and dragging anyone who dies out back and dumping them into the East River.

But again, I don't know how true to life the events in Alienist/Angel, are, but I like to think/pretend that they are entirely truthful, since it makes for a more colorful state of affairs.  Not to mention giving me something to write about.

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