The Devil wins when we wait for Superman

On April 10, 1996, Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell, Mike Inez, and Sean Kinney (with Scotty Olson in support) reunited Alice In Chains for the first time in two and a half years for a live acoustic performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater. The music recorded that evening has been in heavy rotation in my personal catalog for almost 28 years and remains as fresh as the first time I heard it, perhaps even more so if that’s possible.  The album opens with a slow burn intro of the song Nutshell, as each band member takes the stage and picks up their instrument adding layers to it. The song ends and after a brief pause, the unique chords that open the song Brother can be heard, and after several minutes of the most beautifully hypnotic sounds I’ve ever heard, Layne breaks the spell that the audience is under with a very simple “thanks.”  6 years later, Layne Staley would die alone in his apartment, and his body not be discovered for days. His bank would trigger the discovery when his account had been inactive for two weeks. It’s one thing to die alone. It’s another level of alone when your accountant is the first to notice your absence. What’s so hard to accept is this is the way he “wanted” it. And for this reason, to this day, I cannot listen to Alice In Chains without feeling profound sadness. But I love the way their music sounds way too much to not listen. Listening to tracks like Them Bones, Man In the Box, and Would? Instantly transports me back to my dorm during my freshman year of college to the point that I can remember the way that building smelled. Seattle grunge music was blowing up in 1992, but each of the bands that were a part of this revolution had very unique sounds. Unique from other rock bands, and unique from each other as well. Of the four main pillars, the other three being Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden; the band with the most unmistakably distinctive sound was Alice In Chains. Their voices and heavy reliance on tritone harmony was instantly recognizable, yet nearly impossible to categorize even from song to song. It’s equally present when you listen to the sweet pain in the acoustic performance of Brother that I linked to above as it is in the raw contempt for drug abuse in the song Junkhead. Staley isn’t advocating for drug use in this song at all, though it would be easy to make that mistake. He’s mimicking the arrogance of those who are in the early stages of addiction, thinking they are in complete control and feeling superior to the squares who look down on them. And the thing that amazes me to this day is the specific way they employ three part tritonal harmony in the chorus; making a song about something so ugly sound like the most beautiful music in the world to me. What I didn’t know back then was that the lyrics Staley delivered in those incredibly gorgeous and equally tense sounding tritones were the contents of a note he could have written to be found with his already decomposing body in his apartment. He didn’t write most of the lyrics for Alice In Chains songs, that was Jerry Cantrell. But he wrote plenty of them and the ones he didn’t write he sang as though he were living them. The tragedy of Layne Staley is that he knew he was self destructing and was unable to stop it. 

Two years prior to Alice In Chains appearance on Unplugged, I was in my sophomore year of college. Grunge music still dominated my imagination. Then in April, Kurt Cobain died, and Nirvana released its final album which was their iteration of Unplugged. Nirvana’s swan song is that album and the video of that performance. Nirvana didn’t get together to play their greatest hits that night. They played a set that paid tribute to what inspired them to be musicians, with a few songs of their own sprinkled in. 

The musical pioneers of our generation were already leaving us, but doing so with the kind of farewell that ensured they would live forever. 

That summer I went to a movie theater to see Wyatt Earp. While many were gushing over Tombstone, I hadn’t seen it yet, and I was introduced to the story of the Earps and Doc Holliday via Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid instead of Kurt Russel and Val Kilmer. I don’t know when I was introduced to the concept of nihilism, but this movie laid it out plain for me. You know how sometimes folks say “explain it to me like I’m in 3rd grade.”  

Costner’s Earp is a teetotaler; having exorcised demons that came to him in the aftermath of his first wife’s sudden passing. His “breaking the fast” moment here is brought on by his guilt over his inability to love his 2nd wife the way she needs to be, and it’s driving her to destroy herself. Despair is the door the devil uses to whisper poisonous thoughts into our consciousness. If they take root, you get to become a helpless witness to your own self destruction. Wyatt flirted with such a fate in the first act of the movie, and now even considering that he is driving Maddie to the same place has him contemplating a return to the abyss for himself. Doc’s version of consoling someone in such a place is to assure him that little of it matters or has any meaning and he shouldn’t be burdened by it. 

He’s not in Hell, but he can see it from here. 

~2000 years ago in Capernaum, a troubled Jewish woman named Lil told her bartender that she was in Hell.  At least this is how it is portrayed in the first episode of The Chosen which I started watching last year.  Earlier in the episode, Lil shows a palpable fear of Roman soldiers, strongly implying she’s been assaulted, possibly sexually. Her behavior is at times normal, and at other times unpredictable….sometimes violent toward others, sometimes more self destructive. She’s caused such a disturbance that religious leaders are implored to perform an exorcism that fails. Lil’s demons speak directly to the exorcist telling him there is nothing he can do for her.   She wants to die just to put a stop to her suffering and views any attempt to help her as misguided. To Lil, those who intend to help would only prolong her suffering.  Then she meets someone who changes it all. 

Superman was born in comic books as a pop culture surrogate for Jesus. Superman has a problem that is often talked about for all superheroes, but never really solved.  There’s too much disaster going on in the world for any Superhero to save everyone.  Follow that through to its logical conclusion and what you end up with is a world divided between those who love the hero for being there and those who hate the hero for not making it on time. What if Superman could save everyone?  Follow that through to its logical conclusion and you have a world that sees no need to be good because Superman will take care of everything.  It’s easy to envision humanity questioning its own worth when they need Superman just to get through the day. This is fertile soil for the devil’s poisonous seeds to take root in the hearts and minds of humanity. 

This, I suspect is at the root of why so many might struggle with what Jesus is shown doing for Lil when he calls her by her real name, Mary Magdalene and redeems her from the grip of demonic thoughts. 

It’s fitting that Superman, the crusader for truth, justice and the American Way is a complete misinterpretation of the Gospel. But such errors are as American as the Kent’s from Smallville, Kansas are the “American Gothic” image personified. 

We struggle with what it means for Jesus to be our savior. He’s not Superman. He won’t swoop in to save Lois Lane from a helicopter falling off the roof of the Daily Planet building. It might look like he’s doing a variation of that for Lil/Mary. But for her that is only the beginning. She’s been redeemed so that she can become an apostle, someone capable of doing for others what Jesus was able to do for her. 

Just a few months after Alice In Chains Unplugged performance, Layne Staley lost his girlfriend to a heroin overdose. Staley had already been deep in the throes of his own struggles with addiction, but the part of him that wanted to overcome it still inhabited enough of his psyche to keep him engaged with the world. Until this happened. Staley’s heart and mind died that day, and what followed was six years of him waiting alone in his apartment for his body to catch up. 

Former Alice In Chains bass player Mike Starr was the last to see him alive, the night before he died. Starr begged him to let him call 911. His dying friend became angry and threatening. They fought and Starr left. Superman wasn’t coming to save the day, and the dying musician would have told him to fuck off if he did.  

Despair is the door the devil uses to dump poisonous thoughts into our brains.  Waiting for Superman gives him the time and space to do such work. What I see in The Chosen is not to wait for Jesus as a surrogate for Superman either. It’s that Jesus is waiting for me. The tragedy of Layne Staley is submitting to the belief that nobody could have done anything for him. Maybe that is true, but that doesn’t mean we are freed from the obligation to try. It doesn’t mean that Mike Starr’s attempts to save Layne from himself were in vain. What was in vain was that Starr didn’t learn how to save himself either as he suffered a similar fate several years later.  

All of this leads people to draw conclusions about those in a place like Staley. Just as silly as seeing Superman as a cool Jesus in tights, it is equally off base to see Layne Staley as the sum of his mistakes, robbing his legacy of the humanity that made music that was never imagined before and will never be done again. There is so much we can learn about ourselves from trying to see that humanity in everyone suffering such a fate, whether they have already passed on or are still here.  

Everything Must BE This Way....Alternatively...why my 2nd favorite movie will never win a Big Empty Award

 

The scene depicted in this picture is everything at once....showing a flawed, highly sensitive, intelligent artist fighting inner demons that are winning the battle for his soul.  He's recording lyrics that are authentic commentary on humanity, set to a stunningly beautiful intro on a harpsichord that sounds like it would belong either in a gothic horror film or a sad sweet opera......it then suddenly transitions to a bluesy rhythmic bassline that matches up flawlessly with a jazzy organ riff that dances with guitar picking that is precise.  The music and the mood it creates is so intentional it can only be described as perfect.  The singer is recording his track over the music that has already been recorded by bandmates who watch in the studio in a state of ambivalence, not sure whether to feel awe, hope, disgust, or betrayal.  Some make their choice and walk out of the studio.  It portrays the protagonist as pure, beautiful, vulnerable, horrible, ugly and worthy of contempt all at once.  And like so much of what Hollywood creates, it is wrong for a lot of the right reasons without ever really being right for any reason.  What you are seeing is NOT Jim Morrison and his Doors bandmates in a studio, but a talented yet overly ambitious artist telling on himself.  That artist is Oliver Stone, and what we are seeing is the product of how Jim Morrison and The Doors affected his imagination.  We the audience are supposed to feel just like the shadowy blurry background figures, the other three members of The Doors and producer Paul Rothchild watching Jim and trying to decide if the figure in the booth is a genius that will never realize his potential or a narcissistic sociopathic on a collision course with disaster that will hurt everyone within his blast radius when he blows up.

This scene and many others is how I was really introduced to The Doors in 1991.  I was born two years after Jim Morrison passed away and never heard his name until I was in high school.  I had heard songs like Hello, I Love You, Touch Me, and Riders on the Storm such that I was mildly familiar with their music, but I doubt that I could name the band that performed them.  So my first deep dive into a band took place when I was 17, and it was a band I knew almost nothing about.  For that, I think Oliver Stone gave me a gift.  There is no other movie before or after that attempts to do this for any band the way he did it for The Doors.  That alone is worth the price of admission, which I paid multiple times.  The first time I bought a ticket, I wanted to know what it was about The Lizard King that was so captivating to so many people.  I came away confused and even a little angry.  What was I supposed to learn from this other than this guy that is so revered was really a dangerous self-absorbed asshole?  AND yet, I was mesmerized by this hypnotic music and how the effect that it was depicted to have on people in the movie simultaneously had on me while I watched it.  This is where I still to this day can't decide whether the movie fails or succeeds.  If we want to know who Jim Morrison and The Doors were, the movie fails tremendously to give much real insight into that.  If we want to know what it might feel like to be affected by The Doors music without really knowing them at all, it succeeds.  And that might connect us authentically to people who were present for the Doors whether they were fans, bystanders, or passionately opposed to everything the Doors and their generation represented.

Unfortunately, we will not get to see Jim the way people who believed in him saw him.  What we'll see is something magnificent in performance mode, and some person backstage that doesn't seem to square up at all with the person who could inspire such alchemy.  No scene better depicts this than a performance of Not To Touch The Earth that is so fraught with inaccuracy that modern day Twitter (X) trolls could only sit back and admire.  This is a scene that had a profound effect on me when I first saw The Doors.  I was drawn into the performance, with sounds and rhythms so ominous I thought something significant and scary was about to occur during the show.  It did, but not in the performance.  The concert portion of the scene was an intense example of Jim Morrison's ability to form an unspoken bond with his audience so powerful that they would all trust him to take them on a journey that transcended their collective existence.  BUT, the scene is intertwined with a montage of Jim engaging in acts of immense cruelty to those who love him and the consequences of debauchery and excess.  It is the epitome of the conflict that I felt about the entire affair when walking out of the theater after the first viewing.  

Take a minute, and then I'll be back to debrief:

"I am the Lizard King, I can do anything."  At that moment I wanted to believe that, except I just saw this character try to burn his girlfriend alive in a closet, crash into a police car while driving drunk with a naked groupie on his lap, and engage in some pagan marriage ritual with a witch.  It kind of undermines the case for the whole thing.  Also, none of it is true.  Where shall I start.....

1. The scene is meant to convey authenticity by captioning this as some sort of concert that took place in San Francisco in 1968 YET:
• The Doors rarely played outdoor concerts as they liked more intimate indoor settings where they could better connect with their audience
• The Doors didn't play any outdoor evening concert in San Francisco in 1968
• The Doors never opened a concert with Not To Touch The Earth
• Drummer John Densmore was quoted as saying of this scene (and many others in The Doors) that Doors concerts were not filled with people dancing naked, and not once did he ever witness that occurring
2. Jim did not try to burn Pamela Courson alive in a closet by any account from anyone who knew him and if he did in the manner depicted, the whole house would have burned to the ground which there would be plenty of evidence of.
• Those who knew him well readily admit that Jim had a bad temper when drunk, but his temper did not manifest itself in the form of becoming violent toward others, just angry and provocative in ways that got people to be violent toward him.....usually resulting in some type of physical altercation, where he was a punching bag that didn't fight back.
3. Did Jim crash his Bullitt edition Mustang Cobra into a moving police car?  The Big Empty will not think you crazy to assume that there would be a public record of an arrest should that happen to a driver in a car with naked women and booze.  Yet no such record exists.  Nobody knows what happened to Jim's Mustang, some say he crashed it into a tree behind a police station and others say it was crashed into an unoccupied police car and abandoned.  But his very rare Bullitt Cobra edition vehicle is the kind of specimen where car enthusiasts can account for every single model.  Yet what ever became of this car is not known.
4. Jim did not have a Celtic handfasting ceremony with Patricia Keneally until 1970, after many of the events depicted as the climax of The Doors have occurred. Strangely enough, the woman performing the ritual in this scene is the actual Patricia Keneally. She described Stone as giving off vibes that were visionary and brilliant, but also ‘sleazy.’

I could provide evidence all night but why bother.  Big Empty fairly concludes that when watching The Doors, we are seeing what Jim Morrison has inspired in Oliver Stone's imagination.  And that's fair, to Stone.  Morrison is a mystery, gone before anyone could really know or begin to understand him.  But the real footage of him depicts someone who connects with people, not the self-absorbed, self-destructive manipulative maniac that Stone shows.  So while I'm being fair to Stone, I must say that Stone has not given Morrison equal treatment in any way, nor did he even attempt to.  He saw an opportunity to boil down the complex Morrison to equal parts God and The Joker. 

In many ways, The Doors was an opportunity to be rock music's Amadeus.  Instead it was an exploitation film that chooses to show us a one-dimensional binary protagonist the way the most extreme and irrational elements of 60’s culture viewed him.  I suspect what we’re seeing is Oliver Stone projecting his own self loathing onto the image of Jim Morrison and viewing that as some sort of kinship he feels as a fellow artist and lover of moviemaking. The Big Empty cannot award such a movie, yet we here will always love it for drawing us into the real story and helping us to see the kind of magic that such a band could implant in the imagination of a generation in their very short tenure as a band.  And with that, I'll give you the scene described in the opening paragraph....fraught with inaccuracies to the point that significant portions of the actual song being played are totally skipped over.  Yet in my mind, this is the first way I ever heard The Soft Parade, and it is my favorite way to hear it, and the real version sounds wrong to me (but also very very right in an authentic and different way).  Go figure.

(If you're not a fan of this song or just not familiar with it, consider taking a moment to contrast that scene with the actual studio version and consider the differences.....beautiful, absurd, bluesy, and poetic.  It is a commentary on the state of humanity where the music accompanies the lyrical intentions so well.  Nobody attempts art like this right now in any kind of medium.)

What are you missing?

I've been to Frankenmuth, MI exactly once.  I was there for a Thanksgiving weekend vacation in 2012 with family.  We shopped at Bronner's where we purchased ornaments that still go on our tree every year.  They're beautiful....a guitar for me (just a pipe dream), a flute for my wife who plays one at church, a drum for my oldest daughter who played drums in the marching band, a piano for my second daughter,  and a clarinet for my third daughter.  We took in all of the other sites Frankenmuth had to offer, a picturesque downtown with Bavarian architecture, and had a chicken dinner at the Bavarian Inn.  On Saturday, we found a downtown bar to watch Ohio State whoop on a team that won't be named here (this is not a rivalry post).  There were more fans of the home team in this establishment than there were of us.  On Sunday, we left feeling like we'd seen the best of what the place had to offer and entertained the thought of coming back sometime.  Unbeknownst to us, we missed something in the same zip code that would become Frankenmuth's biggest claim to international fame....a collection of musicians aged 13-15 holding impromptu jam sessions in their garage.  Fast forward to September 27, 2022 and I'm in section 117 at the Huntington Center in Toledo to see what became of Frankenmuth’s wunderkinds 10 years later.  This is my view while I chill to the calm vibe in the arena ushered in by “Reasons for Waiting” by Jethro Tull on the sound system.

I don't need to answer any questions when I decide if I like a band.  It's a short and simple process.  I do ask a few hard questions when I decide if I respect them as artists. You can have a lot of fun listening to good music.  But great music, like all great art will dominate your imagination and take you on a journey. You may partake in a vision the artist shares with you, or create one of your own inspired by the art.  

I’ve spent 20+ years sharing music with my kids that they might not otherwise have heard through the normal channels available to them in their lifetime, and I’m blessed to have them appreciate what shaped my generation and prior generations. For my part, I haven’t done much to reciprocate in my appreciation for their generation's music, and I need to do better. 

But the bridge that crosses the generation gap in my family isn’t entirely one way. One of my daughters told me about some new bands that showed appreciation for classic rock and it registered enough that I remember the conversation. But it was an afternoon that I spent with another daughter in Kent in December 2021 that punched it in. Playing in the Twisted Meltz sandwich shop where we were having lunch was music that sounded like classic rock but I didn’t recognize it. So I Shazammed it and only had more questions when the app identified that I was listening to something called Safari Song by a band called Greta Van Fleet. That sounds like a female individual's name (spoiler alert, it is, but in a way that only invites more questions), but the vocalist sounded male and the accompanying video loop that on the Shazam app showed it was clearly a male band, not a female solo artist. Then the confusion only deepened when I also registered that these guys looked like kids who may not be old enough to drive, not aged rockers donning a vintage seventies look that was modern in their own time.  And they were wearing vintage uhm I dunno, outfits? costumes?  something that they made themselves out of things they found around the house?   They sounded really good.  How have I not heard more about this until now?

Were these the guys my daughter told me about in the car several months ago? This sparked a conversation with her sister whom I was with that day, and with the beauty of the iTunes Store at my fingertips, I instantly added two Greta Van Fleet studio albums to my digital collection. I haven’t stopped listening to them since then. But I still have more questions than answers. Is this a tribute, a parody, something more?  Do I like their music? It’s very entertaining and fun. Hell yes I do. I also respect them all as very talented musicians who are far better at what they do than many long tenured pop or rock artists. Do I respect them as creators of art?  I’m starting to, but this is where I’ve struggled the most. I couldn’t decide for a long time if I was getting played by a cynical attempt to mimic what sells to a certain audience, or if this is a sincere effort to expand the artistic palate of the current generation? Another question: if the intent is to expand it, is the goal to get younger audiences to look backward for new perspective or something more?  So many questions. 

What would you call a painter who can duplicate Van Gough’s Starry Night or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa down to the most minute detail, or at least duplicate the method used to create these works? A really good painter perhaps, no an excellent painter. Is this person creating art though?

Every Greta Van Fleet track is fun to listen to. Some because they remind me of legends from previous generations. It would be easy to get caught up in that and almost everybody who talks about Greta Van Fleet does that to a fault. It’s been discussed so much that I won’t dissect it much here other than to say that my hope is that by the conclusion of this post, you’ll be willing to consider that looking at this band through the lens of Led Zeppelin, whether you think of that as a positive or a negative, is limiting your imagination and does you a disservice. 

While it didn't take long for me to conclude that Greta Van Fleet is wildly entertaining to listen to, your mileage may vary.  These are subjective and personal decisions, but I'm clearly not alone.  Where those of us in that camp start to diverge is what we're looking for the band to provide.  My tastes on that have evolved at a pretty fast pace.  Some come to hear what music would sound like if Led Zeppelin were still making music.  Some like the fantasy prog rock sounds and moods that are featured more on their second album.  Rock n roll fans from my generation may appreciate that they are bringing a style of music back to a new generation that may never have decided to explore it.  Critics will call them a knock-off act this is algorithmically designed to show up on our Spotify playlists in a blatant corporately engineered cash grab.  And it's hard to refute that if you listen to tracks like "Highway Tune" what with the Plant like wailing, to JPJ bass lines, and guitar riffs clearly echoing sounds that were a staple of Page's career:  

   Exhibit A: The 2nd coming to led heads?

"When the Curtain Falls" is another great rocker, with an incredible climactic finish immediately following the bridge section at about the 2:56 mark in the video below.  

And this is where I started asking myself if there was anything more to GVF than a fun band to rock out to.  When the Curtain Falls is a song about the inevitable downfall of the latest Hollywood "It Girl", and for the song to have such an upbeat sound and a ragingly triumphant finale begs criticism that it is musically and lyrically disparate. I don't think this is supposed to be a celebration of the trappings of Hollywood, or a dose of schadenfreude. The song is a warning, but it sounds like it revels in the suffering of someone else though.....and musically invites you to delight in it as well.  That’s fine, it’s a great rock song that I’ll continue to enjoy for a long time.  But it’s not artistically significant, at least not to me.  And a lot of classic rock songs aren’t and that doesn’t stop me or zillions of others from loving them for the rest of our lives.  

To their credit, Greta Van Fleet members handle the criticism with grace and maturity. The band was lampooned for a Saturday Night Live performance in 2019 that fans will admit was not their best moment. Nerves and the unusual setting of a tiny stage in a cramped studio playing before a nationally televised audience was not in their comfort zone at that point in their lives and young yet skyrocketing career. But the criticism has actually led to a reverse Streisand effect, calling attention of non-fans and turning them into superfans. This is more accidental than intentional on Greta’s part, but it’s what Bob Ross would once refer to as a “happy accident.”  

Pitchfork was more blatantly scathing, and when I read that column, I thought that would leave a mark.  Quite the contrary.  Josh Kiszka was thoughtful and measured when he heard about it, as though he took time to consider the criticism and didn’t consider it to be written by someone who understood what they were doing. “It’s unfortunate they’d be putting that energy out into the world but that’s their prerogative. I’d like to think there’s some substance to what we’re doing.”  Younger brother Sam was flat out unperturbed, demonstrating the kind of wisdom that many never achieve in an entire lifetime when he said “I don’t know the intent behind the piece.  I’m not sure if it’s a publication trying to get attention or if it’s someone who genuinely doesn’t like us and what we’re doing. If you can’t do it, I guess you just write about it. I feel like this man has had a troubled past. Prayers up for him.”  Touché Sam  As someone who can’t do it and only writes about it, I could feel like collateral damage was inflicted on me, but I don’t at all.  I only admire the anti-fragile approach that is potentially an unexplored yet critical ingredient that has led Greta Van Fleet to success where others have failed whether they deserved to or not. 

Greta has yet another side.  In person they can range from quiet, humble, and sincere to downright zany caricatures of rock icons (and for reasons unknown to me, Oliver Reed, but seriously, take a few minutes to click the link and determine what the hell you just watched, I'll wait).  Their first album called "Anthem of the Peaceful Army" was more an ode to their Frankenmuth garage beginnings… a collection of songs inspired by spending countless hours in the basement listening to their father's cavernous record collection.  The songs are well written and very well performed, though the album is more a testament to musical competence than artistic significance.  So when they followed up with their sophomore album, "The Battle at Garden's Gate", those who want more than Zeppelinesque retro rock appreciated a more mature band offering a humanistic vision of collectively becoming something greater through mass consciousness.  I still had questions.  My cynical side had to wonder if this is the silly side of Greta Van Fleet, composing the love child of Andy Kaufman, and Spinal Tap, with a little bit of Tenacious D thrown in for musical authenticity.

To find out I went to see them in person  and here is how they opened the show:

Philosophy, collective consciousness, inner peace, love not just as a truth but a yearning human need, kickass guitar licks, progressive and thundering drums, and inhuman sounding vocals that are as advertised without the polishing effects of the studio made for the kind of evening that I don't think any other musician or group can provide right now.  

Yes, Greta Van Fleet sound like Led Zeppelin if you hear them on the radio in the background while you're paying attention to something else.  But they are their own eclectic collection of unique artists who want you to envision the album "The Battle at Garden's Gate" as the soundtrack to a story about the difficulty of finding peace, whether it is within ourselves or in the external world.  The "garden" is this place of peace, on the other side of a locked gate, and the battle is our own struggle to find our way in.  While "When the Curtain Falls" demonstrates musical talent, "Trip the Light Fantastic," the penultimate song on Garden's Gate (with a name I'll confess I first thought was absurd until I really listened to the song) puts an exclamation point on the spiritual turn this album has taken, invoking the Ram Mantra in a triumphant chorus sung by a choir at the 2:57 mark, hinting that the long sought but elusive victory to achieve peace is finally being won. 

To comet across the blistering hue

Beyond the spaces of false and true

Away from a world

We have riddled with scars

To be wholly free and

Amongst the stars

The poetry in these lyrics invites the listener to envision being elevated to a higher level of consciousness where earthly troubles no longer matter in the grand scheme of things.  It's an artistic vision that I'm happy to get on board with.  Count me as a member of the peaceful army, and I'm thrilled that these "kids" decided to share their vision.  It's been in my orbit since my Thanksgiving vacation 10 years ago, yet I may never have known except for a random decision to get lunch in Kent last December, when I decided to pay attention for a minute.  So in the spirit of the Big Empty blog and the whole reason that it exists, what you're looking for is all around you if you take the time to notice.

The Pattern is Full (but there’s room for quality)

There was a moment when I realized that going to see Maverick was a good choice. It was when Maverick stood outside the bar he’d just been thrown out of and watched through the window as Rooster played the piano and sang Great Balls of Fire just like his father did in 1986. In that moment, we saw for the first time the humanity of an older, wiser, more world weary, more flawed, more filled with regret Pete Mitchell. But none of that would stop Pete from doing what he’s always done best, which is just be the best. 

It’s a good place to find him. Many of us loved what Maverick did in 1986, but we also knew that Maverick did not have the attributes of someone who was destined to play the role of his superiors like Viper in Top Gun….or even the role that peers like Iceman would assume. 

Mav has regrets, but it doesn't cause him to question what he does better than anyone else.  Nor does it cause him to temper that drive to do it when he knows it will cost him. And damn, maybe a movie about dogfighting in a fighter plane is a throwback to another era, and damn if that isn’t still a lot of fun, but doing what you know you are right about when the wind is blowing way too hard in another direction is exactly the kind of movie we need to get excited about right now. 

See Top Gun Maverick. See it multiple times. Turn your brain off and have fun, but also hear that voice that tells you that you may be the only person that knows what to do when everybody else is mired in bureaucracy and covering their own ass.  That’s what we’ve had more than enough of. That’s what I’ve had more than enough of. 

Go Bucks!

A long time ago the Big Empty editor in chief (yours truly) gave a very eloquent, thoughtful and reasoned explanation as to why he hates the University Of Michigan athletic program and why you should too.  It's a two-part series that serves as a reminder of things that can easily be overshadowed by decades of success.  What he also promised in that series begun 8 years (and counting) ago, was a promise to share the story of how a native New Englander (whose heart still resides there) became an Ohio State Buckeye Fan after moving to Ohio.  On the heels of Ohio State's first loss to the University Of Michigan since that series was written, it is now appropriate to pick this up and carry on.  Here now, is Pt 3.

_______________________________________________

It was some time in the third week of November 1992 that I was asked a simple enough question: "who are you rooting for?"  I had graduated from high school in Hamden Ct. 5 months earlier and began my college career at Heidelberg University (then Heidelberg College) in Tiffin Ohio at the end of the summer.  GO STUDENT PRINCES!  In Connecticut, our home team for college sports was the University of Connecticut Huskies and that is a basketball school and markedly not a football school.  If we wanted to get pumped about college football in Connecticut, we could root for Rutgers I suppose.  They were kinda good back then in a not so memorable way.  We could get excited about Yale, which is rich in football tradition and has a great tailgate environment.  Or we could jump on a bandwagon and root for Miami (the one that isn't in Ohio), Florida State, or USC.  If you just cared about football however you could get it, well the Patriots were horrid then and endured a few winless seasons even IIRC (which I may not, but there was definitely at least one winless season and I recall the season ticket holders showing up to games with paper bags over their heads).  The Giants!  They were good.  Phil Simms! Bill Parcells!  LT!!!  So there you had it.  If you wanted local football greatness, look no further than the Giants...and if you did look further, the view wasn't pretty.

That was my mindset when I was asked the question that would influence Fall Saturdays for the rest of my life.  

Dorm buddy: "So?

Me: "What?"

Dorm Buddy: Who you rootin for Saturday?

Me: Does it matter?

Dorm Buddy and a couple of other people who's antenna were suddenly up: "WTF DO YOU MEAN 'DOES IT MATTER?!'  YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE DO YOU?  YOU'RE INVOLVED NOW."

Me: Ok.  Well I live in Ohio now so Go Bucks!  Screw blue!

Assembled crowd: "whooo!.........I like this guy.......You're alright........" with a couple of "boo, bad choice" type comments thrown in.

And they were right.  Whether I knew it or not, I was involved.  It reminded me of how fellow New Englanders get when it comes to the Yankees vs Red Sox...it's the kind of thing where upon meeting someone, a friendship is either born or never will be.

I didn't care who John Cooper, Gary Moeller or Kirk Herbstreit were at the time.  John Cooper just might be the second most famous coach in the history of Ohio State football, and for all of the worst reasons.  His record was fine: 112-43-2.  But his record against Michigan in those 13 years was 2-10-1(emphasis on the 1 is mine, I'll explain).  Prior to The Game in 1992, Cooper had played Michigan 4 times in his horrific tenure and his record against Michigan was 0-4.  On November 21, 1992, the Michigan Wolverines traveled to Columbus Ohio to meet the Ohio State Buckeyes for their 89th iteration of The Game and the two teams played to a tie.  Ohio State University President Gordon Gee referred to it as a "great victory."  That tells you a lot about the state of affairs at the time.  So in a way, the Heidelberg freshman from Connecticut was a good omen right?  Things were trending in the right direction right?

Well no.  Not really.  Not yet anyway.

Over the next 8 years, I watched very promising Buckeye teams lose to Michigan 6 of those times.  Some of those Michigan teams were lousy all season only to look like a super bowl team when they played the Buckeyes.  How could that be?  It didn't make sense.  But the worst part of it was how insane it felt to watch those games.  In college, the Wolverines would score to go ahead, and just as that dagger pierced my soul, all the UM fans would be yelling and screaming running up and down the dorm hallways pounding on the room doors saving their most intense pounding for any door that had a block O on it.  Damm were they ruthless.  Cooper's most upsetting defeats occurred in 1993, 1995, and 1996 when OSU entered The Game undefeated and ranked in the top 5.  Two of those three losses cost Ohio State a trip to the Rose Bowl, at the time the Holy Grail of College Football.  After college I married into a family that has no shortage of Wolverine fans in it and with the exception of 1998, they made sure to let us know all year long that the Buckeyes lost to their team again.  When asked why they were so quiet that one year, one of them said "because Michigan played like Ohio State instead of like Michigan."  Wow.  Come up with that yourself did you?  By now I cared about who John Cooper was and I'd had enough of him and his "Michigan is just another game" mentality.

How badly I just wanted to see how THEY would handle losing on a regular basis.  Let them see how this feels for an entire year, only to have their hopes dashed again.....and then again the next year....and then again the next year...all the while spending the other 364 days in between each heartbreaker being reminded that their team sucks by a fan in scarlet. 

January 18, 2001.  Enter Jim Tressel being introduced as the new head coach at Ohio State during halftime at a basketball game between OSU and the University of Michigan:

"I assure you that you will be proud of our young people in the classroom, in the community, and most especially in 310 days, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.......on the football field" is a long cry from "just another game."  Brings a tear to my eye.  And boy oh boy did Tressel deliver a nice freaking tall glass of Shut-The-Fuck-Up!!!!!!! to all of the loud mouth obnoxious Michigan fans that I'd grown to know and love over the last 9 years.  For the next 9 years, I got to watch The Game confident that Michigan fans would once again spend the Winter, Spring, Summer and most of the Fall wandering in the wilderness wondering if they would ever beat the Buckeyes again.  For this he will always hold a very special place in my heart.  It was just icing on the cake that he delivered a national championship in 2002, took a selfie with my daughter much later while she was a student during his tenure as the YSU President, and then shook her hand while delivering her diploma to send her on to medical school.

As of this writing, the University of Michigan Wolverines have beaten the Ohio State Buckeyes exactly 4 times in the 21st century. One of those victories occurred in 2021. You have to go back 10 years to find the last time this happened. UM fans, the same ones who were so chirpy back when I was in college, were so incredibly beautifully quiet and humble over the last 20 years. But humble and quiet isn’t the nature of the skunk weasel, and one brief moment in the sun has launched them back to type at breakneck speed. The rivalry which inspired this Big Empty posting trilogy was comatose, and fans on both sides were having a sincere debate about whether or not pulling the plug was the accurate and even humane thing to do.  Not so fast folks.  Miracles are real.  Just ask Jim Tressel or any Ohio State fan in November of 2001. 

Ohio State fans allowed themselves adopt a John Cooper mentality, treating Thanksgiving weekend like it was “just another game.”  A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral.  The Buckeyes showed up for a moment of silence, and the Wolverines showed up for revenge.  I didn’t like it, but I like their reaction to it.  Without that 2021 iteration of The Game, you don’t see the Buckeyes string together a glorious Rose Bowl comeback.  And without it, you wouldn’t get the awesome spectacle that will take place this fall in the Shoe.  I for one am here for it.  Ohio State and Michigan fans are blessed to play in a Super Bowl of their own making every single year. Long live the rivalry. Long live The Game!

Bad Vibes

I'm not sure how I got my love for documentaries, but I have to admit that I have a morbid fascination with things that have gone terribly wrong.  It can be interesting in fiction...one can easily recall the feelings that are invoked by early scenes in movies like the Towering Inferno or Jaws where Paul Newman and Roy Scheider appear in scenes that depict pristine happiness while making dire predictions to arrogant, greedy and indifferent businessmen and politicians.  You and the protagonist know things will get bad, very bad, but everybody who can do anything about it is oblivious and the die has already been cast.  It is something altogether more captivating when it happens in reality and since the documentary is one of the best ways to handle these subjects, I'm always interested.  So while I don't know exactly when I became a fan, a program that aired on VH1 in April of 2000 pulled me in and haunted me for days, weeks even.  And every so often, I'm drawn back to anything that reminds me of it.

All packed into one hour of commercial television was some of the most engrossing programming my 26 year old self could get into.  I'd graduated college 4 years before, got married and started my first real job 3 years before, started my first real career 2 years before, became a father 1 year before and had my second daughter on the way.  I had been too busy since college ended to keep up with what the #kidsthesedays were doing.  The music artists that I came of age with were fading and some of them had already gone to a way too early grave.  Others had checked out from the commercial scene or at least stepped away from the spotlight.  Plenty of garbage came in to fill in the gap and take over MTV.  I guess I liked to think that I'd outgrown what 17-22 year olds were doing...but it could just as easily be less flatteringly described by saying what was "in" had passed me by.  

That was fine with me.  My mind was on other things, and the younger part of my generation looked silly to me.  They had no taste in good music if they couldn't tell the difference between Alice In Chains (the Layne Staley version) and Bush.  You can't teach a blind person what good looks like.  So while I was sleeping, Limp Bizkit came in like a thief in the night and took everything.  They took MTV away and had my junior Gen Xers saying "Kurt who bro?" while they fought with Millennials to block their attempts to flood the medium with boy bands and Brittany Spears (the pre-conservatorship version).  "Who the hell is Limp Bizkit...and anybody that listens to a band with a name like that has to be stupid as fuck" I told myself as I watched the evening news and got to bed early because I had a job and also might need to get up in the middle of the night to rock my daughter back to sleep.  I'd never heard their music and I didn't want to.  

More on that later, back to April of 2000.  I was too young to know anything about Altamont, barely old enough to have heard about The Who's tragic Cincinnati incident, and too distracted to know what happened at Woodstock 99 when VH1 presented an episode of their RockStory series called Concerts Gone Bad which covered all three events.  These events are man-made disasters that are tragic not only in their outcomes but in:

1. how preventable it all was before the die was cast, and 
2. how inevitable it was after.  

The thing about documentaries that flirt with being disaster porn is that they spend a lot of time playing in the space where the storm is coming and you're the only one that knows it.  That's the part that haunts me to this day.  I wanted to re-watch the show but it aired in pre-dvr, pre-youtube days and VH1 had no archives online to be found.  So I researched the subjects on my own.  I've rewatched Gimme Shelter countless times, and read many books on the subject and no matter how much I scratch the itch, I can't get rid of it.  I've watched countless hours of youtube video of Woodstock 99 trying to sort out whether there were any clues missed by attendees or live viewers but in hindsight look glaringly obvious that this was not a good place to be.  There aren't many.  There are definitely things that provide corroborating evidence of criminal behavior, but there are stories of absolute menace and horror at Woodstock 99 that aren't captured on video in the way the Meredith Hunter stabbing or the Station Fire in Warwick RI are.  

Woodstock 99 is getting more attention than it has since the riot fires in Rome NY stopped smoldering thanks to a perfect storm of media: a podcast published in 2019, an HBO documentary out last month, and the return of Limp Bizkit to the festival scene last week.  So back to those guys.  I hated them before I knew them, which probably wasn't fair.  The first time I heard them was by chance when Rearranged played on the radio.  It's such a surreal thing to put myself back in that moment because at the time, I liked the mood of the song and how the vocals flowed so well with with the vibe and rhythm, I respected the guitar playing and found the lyrics to be thoughtful and interesting.  

"Life is overwhelming, heavy is the head that wears the crown

I'd love to be the one to disappoint you when I don't fall down"

I thought I hated them and now I was thinking about buying the album.  That would have made me like so many people who bought a Smith's album after hearing How Soon is Now or those who ran out to by Everlast after hearing What It's Like only to find out that said songs do not at all represent the catalog.  I was spared that fate in this case and for the record, I like a lot of The Smiths music that doesn't sound like How Soon.  In 2003 I watched MTV's Icon special dedicated to Metallica where Limp Bizkit performed a cover of Welcome Home (Sanitarium).  Nobody plays that song better than Metallica, but LB's performance was pretty frickin' lit.  And since this was my first time seeing what their performances are like live, I also got a little taste of how douchey frontman Fred Durst could be.  The media had a bunch of narratives out there that leveled accusations on Fred for inciting riots at their shows.  I didn't know it at the time, but this Fred was subdued compared to what he could usually be like, and I took his enthusiasm as a show of respect for Metallica.  Plus it would be a pretty stupid move to try and ruin Metallica's TV show.  Ultimately, they didn't seem like my cup of tea, but I appreciated their appreciation for a great band and a great song.  

And then at some point, the VH1 documentary crawled back into my brain and I started reading up about Woodstock 99.  I didn't have to look very hard to learn that Bizkit was at the forefront of a lot of the controversy surrounding that event that ended with festival goers burning trailers and vendor booths to the ground.  The absolutely terrible things that happened to some festival goers are well documented and like with Altamont, the speculation about who is to blame is well explored to the point that I won't attempt to solve it here.  So why do I keep returning to Woodstock 99 and Altamont?  There's a portion of The Towering Inferno that depicts a party where everyone is having a great time, but the fire that will destroy the building has already begun and nobody knows that they need to get out.  Most escape unharmed, but many don't.  And for a lot of it, many people aren't aware that anything is wrong, and a few nefarious types are well aware of it and would rather ignore or perpetuate the problem.  

Well that describes the feeling that I get when I watch LB perform at Woodstock 99.  I find myself rocking out to the performance while terrible things are happening.  The whole scene is bizarre.  Fred and most of his band rock their bro outfits, and Wes Borland (in one of his trademark costumes with crazy face paint and solid black contact lenses) puts on a hell of a show in 90+ degree heat with a heavy coat on.  The sound of Wes's riffs with the thundering bass at the beginning of Counterfeit sounds ominous and pregnant with the potential for menace.  And when the band explodes, I want to explode too.  

Fred's ability to work a crowd is on full display and the scene is awesome and terrifying in the response that he elicits.  And of course there's the notorious performance of Break Stuff where most narratives will tell you things really came to a head.  Perhaps.  Judge for yourself I suppose.  When the crowd complies with Fred's commands to actually start breaking shit, you see a lot of stuff that looks pretty scary, and a few brief glimpses of females being criminally mistreated as male attendees grope and fondle with absolute disregard their humanity.  That had been happening for over 36 hours before Limp Bizkit took the stage though.  

Who should be blamed when a festival goes wrong?  Festival organizers, promoters, vendors, performers?  The attendees themselves?  Ultimately everyone is responsible for their own choices, yet those who plan an event own a certain amount of responsibility for the environment.  I meant it when I said that I'm not trying to solve who is to blame, but a few lessons learned are appropriate if anyone wants to build a festival from scratch on a site not made to house half a million people.  If people are sleeping in shit from overflowing port-o-jons in the campground and there isn't anybody to attend to it, is it unfair to blame the folks who planned the festival?   The planners say it is but I don't buy it.  Sure attendees can leave, but they spent a lot of money to be there and were sold on an experience that wasn't as advertised, especially when the flimsy last minute infrastructure failed almost instantly.  A disaster isn't caused by any one thing, but people do become who they really are when they are only governed by their own conscience.  Woodstock promoters sell an environment of total freedom where people police themselves and whatever the people do in that environment is on them.  Except there are rules.  You have to pay exorbitant costs for food and water while baking in the sun with no shade.  When there are no rules, than people who only follow rules for self preservation will be playing by their own rules.  They will learn things about themselves in those circumstances, and when they're hot, exhausted, dehydrated, bilked, and in unsanitary conditions, they'll learn these things when they are already more stressed than they've probably ever been in their young lives.  Can you really say everything would have been fine if Fred Durst was more subdued or if the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't end their set by playing a cover of Jimi Hendrix' Fire?  The festival organizers made little effort to clear the metaphorical forest of kindling, and in some cases doused it in lighter fluid before any concert attendees arrived to light a match.  Maybe they didn't know that, but ignorance does not inoculate you from charges of negligence.  

So the organizers are responsible for the environment, but the people are responsible for themselves.  Is it fair to blame the environment on the choices people make?  Ideally, the attendees could have become a community that worked together to restore decent conditions and help each other.  Human history does little to inspire confidence in this.  The festival has been described by more than one journalist or attendee as something out of Lord of the Flies.  And that story is basically an exploration of what happens when any community descends below the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  

For his part, Durst is still haunted by Woodstock in the sense that the disaster can't be discussed without mentioning him... all for just doing exactly what Limp Bizkit was brought there to do.  And he's still affected by it.  One can't help but think that his "Dad Vibes" costume at Lollapolooza last week was at least partially inspired by the narrative he's been linked to.  He wore the hell out of an upper middle aged used car salesman outfit and toyed with the audience by politely saying "thank you very much for inviting us into your home" before proceeding to perform exactly the way he always has, then retreating back into his Dad persona in between songs.  Wes, crazily costumed as ever did what he's always done, and so did the rest of the band.  And the crowd jumped like crazy just like they always have at LB concerts when they were told to.  For many of them, it was their first time ever seeing them live.  What was different this time?  Are the Dad Vibes the only difference maker from the bad vibes of Woodstock 99?  Doubtful.  And just to make the troll even more epic, after a rousing intro, "Dad" Durst opens the set with Break Stuff.

Epilogue: I was very pleasantly surprised today to find that someone had uploaded a VHS recording from a broadcast of the VH1 RockStory documentary that started me down this path so long ago.  So this is my appreciation post for the brief documentary that set me on the path that leads to a significant portion of the content on this blog.

The Sci-Fi 1st Runner Up

Our Big Empty Movie Awards Sci-Fi category continues after a couple of detours.  Recall that Star Trek was somewhat panned in the previous Sci-Fi thread.  It earned that, and the attempt to boldly take the show where it had never gone before, namely the movies, didn't help matters.  The very cleverly named Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released in 1979 after Star Wars invigorated the public about where modern special effects could take our imaginations and Close Encounters of the Third Kind proved there was an appetite for Sci-Fi that wasn't about dog fights in space.  What Star Trek: The Motion Picture brought us was state of the art special effects and a very cerebral concept.  What they forgot to pack in this lunchbox though was any kind of a discernable plot.  The first time I saw it as a kid, it was playing on TV at a house we were visiting, and us youngsters found ourselves saying "I don't get this" and "what's going on" and "let's go outside" and then coming back in and saying things like "this is STILL on?" and "how did they get to this?"  I watched it again from beginning to end a few months ago for the second time and I don't have anything to add to that.  The movie was a financial success, but a massive critical failure, and it called into question whether or not the ride that we were enjoying from Star Wars and Superman was coming to an end.  Superman II and The Empire Strikes Back would answer that question with a resounding "No!", meaning that there must be something wrong with Star Trek.  

A word about Red Dawn

I just recently watched the extended Director’s Cut of Red Dawn. The prologue that was left out of the theatrical version really adds some suspense that I would have felt more strongly about had I not known what was coming next. An ominous opening where we join a foreign high command operations planning session in progress sets the stage for how the attack that almost brings America to its knees was so successful. 

Doc review: The Last Dance

 

There was something about watching The Chicago Bulls in the 1990s that looked different. That this team, the organization, the players, and the fans all knew they were the best there ever was or ever will be. They knew it before they won their first of six NBA championships and the rest was just proving it to the world that didn’t know any better. The very first time I saw how they introduced their starting lineup on the NBA on NBC (insert obligatory “YES!” From Marv Albert), I was in love. “That’s how they do this?!  Oh I’m here for this whenever the Bulls are on TV!”

Sci-Fi takes a turn in the Big Empty Spotlight

Here in the Big Empty move review series, we mentioned that this is one of the genres that has some difficulty getting respect. Some of your audience comes willing and able to suspend all disbelief. Most of it doesn’t. So you’ve gotta give the peoples a reason to buy in. If you make them feel silly, they’ll never forgive you unless you’re making Barbarella. Everything about that movie is embarrassing and cringey although it has a cult following that we here at the Big Empty doubt would exist were it not for the flesh and the wild imagination about who inhabits it. 

Star Trek tried to be a serious and socially conscious show, exploring all sorts of human concepts combined with adventure. And, it was also the show that had scenes like this.

I have no doubt there is some profound point to be made at the end of this but I’m not sticking around for it. 

Doc Review- Challenger: The Final Flight

To have it told in pop-culture today, one could easily get the impression that my generation all watched the Challenger disaster together in real time in school and were all simultaneously traumatized. It’s easy to see how that narrative would get traction when trying to boil a historical event down to the least common denominator for a nation. But that’s not how I think about that day. 

The SuperWinner award goes to:

 

So first, to recap and briefly summarize, Superhero movies in the 21st century are a mixture of sci-fi, pro-wrestling (with each character getting their own theme music playing whenever they make an appearance) and an attempt to make modern American mythology in a Greco/Roman vein.  The epilogue to the Justice League Snyder cut (the last feature film with the reimagined Superman) now hints that if there is to be a sequel, that....well look for yourself:

Superhero 1st Runner Up

 

To learn about Wonder Woman while I was growing up and not reading comic books, I had to rely on a campy TV show (starring Linda Carter), or the Superfriends cartoon on Saturday morning. To be fair, this is all I had to get to know anything about Batman during the same time period. She didn’t get a major movie in the early 80s that made a splash like Superman did. 

Right or wrong, I viewed her as a character similar to Superman in many ways, but provided girls a hero of their own. Both characters wore similar colors and had similar power sets, but WW also had some unique things to distinguish her from being another Supergirl. 

Superhero Awards 2nd runner up

 Character development matters here. I’m not a comic book fan looking to see a silver screen version of what I spend all of my spare time reading about. Think of me, movie maker people, as the person who isn’t a sure thing to buy a ticket even if I hate your movie. I’m the person who wants to see an interesting character and come to root for them to go to another level, and rise to a unique challenge that I can relate to. 

Superhero Rant: This is my edgy Director's Cut Version of the Previous Post (and an Easter Egg for sci-fi)

This one is coming in a little hot, and is rated only for mature audiences.

Superhero movies are looooong. And now, you can’t just watch one version, each one has a director's cut that adds at least an hour more. And what does the extra time get you? For each 1 part of character development you get 10 parts additional big booms. 

Language warning. If you don’t like raw honest profanity, stop reading here.

Superhero Awards

Can we try an interactive approach....a sort of thought experiment if you will? Take a listen to the music embedded in the video below.  I’ll wait.

Why does the world need a superhero?

Part 1: Why does a superhero need us?

We better not need one too much....for most of our problems we're going to have to rely on our faith and ourselves, with a little help from our family and friends to get through it.  And occasionally, we get an assist from an angel....some inexplicable help that showed up at a time when there was little hope.  That's the relationship that we can also have with a superhero at the movies.  

A Word About Professional Wrestling

There is no shortage of good programming about professional wrestling.  That seems a little ironic because the actual programming that professional wrestling puts out is not meant to be taken seriously.  Very serious things happen to professional wrestlers, but it only gets formally communicated to the audience if it serves the story....and there are many parts of that story that are not at all serious.  The line between fiction and reality is very blurred and so there are times when something goes horribly wrong that the audience thinks it's part of the show.  And there are times when you're told something horrible has happened, and you might even witness it happening, and it is all scripted.  In many ways, it served as a prototype for how politics looks today.  Kayfabe is the part of wrestling that is only supposed to be discussed backstage.  The audience isn't supposed to be in on anything that is kayfabe.  There is a lot of kayfabe in politics where you'll find that people who behave like mortal enemies on television are actually working together behind the scenes, but they have to sell their hatred of the other party to their home constituency.  I'm going to spend a few paragraphs pointing out how pro-wrestling isn't really any different than anything else that is respected in society, and try to explore the reason why it doesn't get any respect...at least not the typical kind.

Doc Review - Crime Scene: Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel

 A few years ago, pre-corona, I was away from home on what we then referred to as a business trip.  That was this thing where people left their homes and offices to conduct their work in another location.  I did it so often back then that I rarely got excited about it anymore.  There were airports, security lines, shuttles and trams, rental cars, uber rides, hotels to check into and all sorts of other things that often left little time beyond work to explore much.  And now I miss it terribly.  I don't remember which trip I was on, where exactly I was, or what portion of the wait part of the hurry-up-and-wait cycle of air travel I was in when I began reading an article about L.A.'s most notorious hotel.  I can't find the article anymore.  Thanks to the documentary I'm reviewing, a Google search using the keywords I'm looking for yields literally a hay field.  That's ok.  Finding it isn't critical to this review.