Noise Reduxion

By Priest October 27th, 2013, under Music

I’ve spent a lot of time updating the music section of this site, ostensibly for an audience of 12 people. Music being so subjective, I’ve learned long ago to never inflict my musical taste on others. While many musician friends of mine tend to pin me down and force me to listen to their latest tracks, I’ve always been of a mind to hand you a tape and leave the room. I’ve never been invested in the praise of others, and false praise—polite praise—is the absolute worst. As with most creative people, when I review my own work, all I see are the flaws and the missed opportunities, so listening to my own music tends to make me cringe. Listening to it in the company of others is simply unbearable, and I tend to get up and walk out.

I’d been wanting to clean up that code for a few years, but finally had a window of time in which to tackle it. I’m still in the process of remastering some of the clips there to make them sound a bit better (which doesn’t help my singing at all, but at least the awful singing will be clearer). I was inspired to do this by someone I refer to as Nancy The Terrible, who was, essentially, Lucy Van Pelt to my Charlie Brown back when she was 13 at the Word of Life summer camp in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. I’d said some fairly mean things about Nancy, as I’ve said about many people, especially in the older bowels of this site. I think I’ve always intended to be frank but not mean. I personally get bored reading obviously whitewashed histories or watching those DVD extras where the cast and crew all claim to have gotten along sublimely when you know, for certain, William Shatner had ego problems and Patrick Stewart was well-known for his on-set tantrums. I don’t think we need to bash each other but let’s at least be truthful: not all relationships were perfect. I myself spent a lot of time being a jerk—usually unintentionally, but a jerk nonetheless.

In any case, I went up there to edit the mean things I said about Ms. Terrible and just couldn’t stand looking at the abominable 1990’s code anymore, and, thus, an obsession was born. I caution everyone: the music section has precious little commercial value, and, other than a couple clips of MD “Doc” Bright playing bass on one of my songs, the section has absolutely nothing to do with comics. It has, an at best nostalgic value to those who participated in my music projects over those years, and hopefully the archive will serve as a reminder of what we shockingly now know were, in fact, the good ol’ days. Beyond that, it’s just me whining about ex-girlfriends. Your mileage may vary.

Is It Just Me

By Priest January 8th, 2013, under Movies

The first act of The Dark Knight Rises, set eight years after the Batman’s last sighting, delivers an out-of-shape and genuinely hobbled Bruce Wayne in a brilliant encounter with Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle. The scene promised far more in terms of personal conflict than this blowhard of a film could deliver. Wayne’s return to action goes far too smoothly. There should have been more struggle and Batman should have gotten walloped on his first time back: an out-of-practice pianist taking the stage. I assume the producers didn’t want the audience to sit through two disparate Wayne rehabs, but the one they chose just bored me to tears. We all knew Batman would rise—it says so, right there in the title. The lunatic from Frank Miller’s eminently superior The Dark Knight Returns, pulling on the batsuit and going on obvious suicide missions, would have motivated the film much more efficiently. Alfred’s walk-out would have made a lot more sense had two-thirds of the movie featured a clearly out-of-his-league Batman, too angry or too proud to hang it up for good or who needs the humiliation to break through psychologically to the mental state required to resume his career. They could have saved millions on CGI effects and silly explosions had they only written an actual script.

Full essay is here

 

Should Auld Acquaintance Be

By Priest January 2nd, 2013, under Uncategorized

No, I don’t know where I’ve been in 2012. I mean it. I have almost no recall of last year other than being trapped, almost around the clock, in my home office working on design and advertising projects while the world passed by on CNN. Looking back over the year, I realized that, outside of working for other people, I’ve accomplished virtually nothing. This stuff is incredibly time consuming and leaves you creatively and intellectually exhausted, so the thought of coming up with some pithy blog post or, even more challenging, a comic book plot, becomes an extremely steep hill to climb. I was actually kind of shocked to finally get back over here to my own website and realize it’s been more than a year since I posted anything here, and at least as long since I’ve checked Jim’s Comic Book Life email over at the DigitalPriest account. The annual Holiday Dead Stop has afforded me a little time to pause and look around, so I’ll be making an effort to comb through what appears to be a 13-month backlog of email while updating this WordPress installation (which means this blog may come down for a while as I update and reinstall).

Presuming anybody’s actually paying attention anymore, I hope and pray you all had a great year. More important, I hope and pray for great things in the year to come. I’ll do my best to be here more  often (which is easy, if I show up even twice in 2013). And my apologies to what I’m sure are a great many people who’ve sent messages to my dead-letter office. Back to you soon.

—Priest

The Letter “A”

By Priest January 2nd, 2013, under Writing

Back when I was writing comics, I discovered, to my chagrin, that the letter “A”  looks exactly the same, regardless of who types it. Brilliant writers, hack writers, non-writers: the letter “A” looks precisely the same. I also discovered that people who lack this particular gift of expression also lack much respect for it. Respect, I’ve found, comes in two distinct flavors: (a) the phony respect we offer up to people who pay us and (b) the more difficult kind of respect we show for things that exist in a realm beyond our own ability to necessarily comprehend. I have enormous respect for, say, pro golfers and people who paint landscapes. I understand neither discipline. I can be walked out to the water’s edge, beyond which I will happily defer to the experts in these fields. When I fly to New York on business, for example, I usually let the pilot fly the plane. I don’t come up there into the cockpit and start flipping switches.

With writing, though, everybody can type the letter “A.” And, rather than me falling in love with my own words, it is usually the client who does that. Why? Because they are usually not professional writers. They sell hair spray and dental floss. Which is not to put down people who sell hair spray and dental floss but to point out there is a reason people hire professionals. Hiring a professional and then interfering with their efforts to make you richer than you already are is just stupid. I don’t understand people who continue walking past the water’s edge until their hat floats.

Trek: I Was Wrong

By Priest November 26th, 2011, under TV

Worf actually has been seen on-screen commanding the Enterprise.

In the closing moments of the Season Four episode “Data’s Day,” Data arrives on the Enterprise bridge to assume command of the graveyard shift and relieves Worf, who is in command of the Enterprise and seated in the captain’s chair.

Meanwhile, the sequel to Abrams Trek has been pushed back (surprise) 11 months:

 http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45436393/ns/today-entertainment/