New Agnostic Front - The American Dream Died (But It Lives!)

I got this from Nuclear Blast on a pre-order. They shipped early, so I have been able to rock this in my car for several days.

For the first several listens, a couple of tracks stand out. I like the sing-along vibe of "Old New York." There are a couple of other tracks that use an effects pedal and a nice chord progression that I was jamming along without even really listening to the lyrics. I think track six is the one that sticks on that level. There are also nice use of samples, that reinforces the titular theme - that of a longing for an ideal past. Though I would argue that the American Dream writ large is still alive. The debate is over how close the current reality is to the perceived ideal (and if that ideal is what we should be striving towards).

But I digress. The main complaint here is that the album is too short. You're jamming to the intro and the next thing you know the intro is repeating itself. No worries. It just means that I have to troll the back catalog to satiate the AF hunger. Thankfully they have plenty back there.

Palmer Eldrich's Fourth Stigmata

I have liked the previous things I have read by Dick. These books include “The Man in the High Castle,” “Ubik,” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. All of them were marvels of world building and storytelling. They were also fun mind-trips that set your thoughts of the future racing.

That said, I never really got into “Three Stigmata”. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe it was me first realizing the sexism in the book, where women are good pretty much for one thing. But I can let that pass. People still smoked everywhere in the book too. There’s a planet to moon videophone call that needs an operator to set up. I get that fiction is as much about the time it is written as it is about the time it is supposed to portray.

Maybe it was the plot, based on the drugs that people use to escape reality. Not sure..

Wait a minute. I know what it was. It was the ending, It didn’t really resolve for me and I have no idea what was going on. The book got too far wound up with its competing realities and it never really unwound, even reading slowly and rereading.

You, however, may like it. Clearly you are smarter than I am.

Leary is still the same person he was when I was 11: Dennis Leary's "Why We Suck"

I used to really like Dennis Leary. His “No Cure for Cancer” album was something that I listened to a lot, and could recite the routines and sing the songs by heart. I was maybe a little young to be listening to it, so it had this illicit air about it. Leary was unapologetically who he was, and no one could take that from him. I wanted to be just like that!

But that was the 90s. Maybe it was a backlash to the perceived PC movement or something, but what worked for him on that album is carried over on this book, and it doesn’t work. I know the book is dated, so I don’t know if this is true of Leary now, but he just seems like a sad reactionary here. The world has changed and it’s different, so he’s mad. It is a little more complex than that, but that was how I felt reading this document. Leary makes a point to have anecdotes that show just how smart he is, so he has “intellectual” bonefides (plus he was riding on the “Rescue Me” accolade when this was coming out). 

Leary is smart, that is not at issue. He just wants things to be the way they were when he grew up in terms of gender roles. When he writes of these, he feels like the embarrassing uncle at Thanksgiving. But as I said, he’s complicated. Leary writes with an enlightened view on race relations, so it’s confusing. He doesn’t seem to like either party, so it is hard for me to just categorize him and then dismiss him, but his stich hasn’t aged well. The only reason I kept reading the book to the end was to see if it got better, hoping that it would but not optimistic about it. It didn’t. It reminded me that I wasn’t the same person I was when I was 11. For better or worse, Leary is still the same person he was when I was 11.