Author: SilentBen

Not often silent, but undoubtedly always Ben.

Friday 5: Songs of Relationships Past

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In the spirit of giving me some writing prompts and getting me writing with some regularity, I’ve decided to start a weekly post.  I may organize most of my posts by some sort of system, but I have yet to decide what that system will be.  But this particular one I like – it is called Friday 5 (some call it Five for Friday – I’m going for brevity … in titling at least).  Each Friday I will post a list of five things on some topic.

Today’s Fiver will be five songs that remind me of my high school girlfriend (it may sound sweet, but read on before making any such assumptions).  I want to preface this list with a few disclaimers:  first – I’m very happily married and have no regrets about the relationships I’ve had; second – this list should in no way be construed as either pining or resentment as it is far from either.  I came up with this particular list subject because I happened to hear two of these songs in the car yesterday on my way home from work (and, well, as I said – they remind me of her … for various reasons as will be specified):

  1. Promise – Violent Femmes: this song was on a mix tape that she made for me when we first started dating.  While I was already a fan of the Femmes, I hadn’t heard this one prior to that tape.
  2. Sympathy for the Devil – Jane’s Addiction: this song was actually the topic of an argument we had.  See, having been a high school kid at the time, I was not well versed in a lot of music.  But this is a song that she played a lot and it seemed familiar for reasons I couldn’t place.  After a while I put together that it was a remake of a Rolling Stones song and tried to find a record in my dad’s collection that had the track (which I couldn’t).  I mentioned the origin to her anyway (sans evidence – no internet at the time) and she wouldn’t believe me.  She was adamant that Perry Farrell would never opt to reuse someone else’s work and suggested that maybe the Stones copied it.  That festered with me for some time.
  3. Loser – Beck: the memory associated with her and this song falls in my brain under the category of irony.  See, when this song became popular, she was in her third year of Spanish (I took French – I’m a lover).  And yet she couldn’t even begin to tell me what the Spanish line in the chorus translated to.  After some research and thought, I figured out that it meant, well, “I’m a Loser” (which in hindsight should have been obvious).  But she found my results to be dubious.
  4. Fly Me to the Moon – Frank Sinatra: the summer that things went south for us, she somehow got into a Frank Sinatra phase (I never quite understood that – probably because I wasn’t around her enough after that to get a chance to).  She even sent me a mix tape with this and a few other songs of his on it.  It never really grew on me.
  5. Brick – Ben Folds Five: following our split, it took me a while to grow past it.  This song actually helped by letting me imagine her as the so-described brick of which I needed to let go.  Oddly, while this song definitely was very cathartic for me at the time, hearing it again in the present pulls me back to those feelings it helped me move past (again with the irony).

So that is my first list for this new meme.  I hope you found it insightful.  Feel free to leave comments or maybe your own song list.

Socially Conscious

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It seems that I’m branching out.  I’ve done something that I didn’t think that I’d ever do – I signed up on Facebook.  I avoided it for a long time, but now I’m in and I can’t leave it alone.

The thing is, I’m not technophobic.  Internet technology is my life and my work.  I’ve been doing some form of social networking long before it had a name.  In college, well before the majority of the world knew what a website was (mostly because very few people had seen one yet), I had found myself absorbed into a realm of online chat rooms and bbs sites and usenet groups – so much so that I nearly failed my second semester.  Which is precisely one of the reasons that I have forced myself to be cautious of my involvement in such services since.

I use email and IM, but mostly only as needed and primarily reactively (many of my friends can attest to the fact that I’m not very good at keeping in touch).  I’ve generally reserved my use of the internet as an information tool and avoided active engagement.  Even this blog is something I do fairly casually and without any strong compunction to vigilance (readership is not a strong goal here – though I do thank those of you who choose to read).

So as I said, I took that plunge.  It was initially not intended for dedicated use (I actually created my account to be able to test something for work).  But I’m not it now and I’m connecting with lots of people that I haven’t talked to or seen in years (in some cases, decades).  I try to limit the time I spend there (it can be addictive), but I’m there and I’m embracing it.  I figure it will be an interesting way to learn some things about some of the people with whom I’ve crossed paths (and maybe they will learn a few things about me as well).  Maybe my life will be profoundly effected by people I previously barely knew.  Who knows.  The least I can do is branch out there and see what happens.

Blood Rites

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Okay – after five books, there are too many different enemies that Harry Dresden has gone against to list.  I wasn’t sure that there could be many more unique supernatural elements with which he could face off.  Enter a troop of purple gorillas flinging flaming, well, I’d imagine you could guess – and this is just in the first few pages!  Through the rest of Blood Rites, Jim Butcher pits our tall, lanky hero up against succubi, black vampires, and … porn stars?

Blood Rites finds Harry relying on some less likely side-kicks including an incubus who turns out to have an interesting secret, a fellow wizard and former mentor, a mercenary, and a fiesty puppy.  He has been avoiding one of his friends – Michael Carpenter, a Knight of the Cross – due to the fact that he had picked up a coin containing a fallen angel and worried how Michael, a hunter of fallen angels, might react.  And he takes on a case where it seems a string of porn stars have been dying in bizarre accidents that may be black magic.  in his downtime, he opts to take on a nest of black vampires camping out in the Chicago slums.  He doesn’t come out of either debachle unscathed (nor do these two incidents add up to all the strife Harry must diffuse/survive).

Six volumes in and Jim Butcher continues to impress and amaze.  There seems to be no winding down for this series and I wouldn’t want to see it end.  The series has always been cohesive and fluid, but it is interesting seeing the greater arc beginning to develop.  Plus the fact that wizards tend to live for centuries, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this series survive its author (though that would be a long way off).  I know I’ve said it before, but I will say again that I can read this series forever.

Eureka!

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Okay, the title reminds me that there is another show in limbo that I wish I knew the fate of.  That aside, there is good news in the world of television!  It seems that both Chuck and Dollhouse have been renewed!  So it seems that both NBC and Fox realized the value in some of their assets enough to give them another chance.

With NBC, my guess is that the prime reason that Chuck’s fate was questionable was the fact that they are opting to give Leno the 10-spot 5 days a week starting this fall which seriously hampers their drama line-up.  I’m not sure how much the Save Chuck campaigns factored into their decision, but thankfully they decided to squeeze it in.  I will highly be looking forward to seeing Chuck start kicking ass with his newfound intersect abilities.

As for Fox – they have earned a reprieve from any sort of boycott from me.  Granted I would have liked to see another season of Terminator over drawing out Fringe any longer (especially after their questionable finale showing off an alternate reality where the twin towers survived), Dollhouse was a more solid show and deserved the renewal.  I can’t wait to see how things progress with Ballard now a company man and Alpha’s schemes gone awry.  Plus I can never see too much of Echo in action – they couldn’t turn down that kind of eye candy on primetime television (I always had faith).

Finally, prompted by my choice in title I am happy to report that season 3.5 of Eureka will be starting up on SciFi in July.  So all is well in the world of TV … for now.  Well, aside from a half dozen other cancellations that have alerady happened and renewals that shouldn’t have … we must take what we can get.

From the First to the Last

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The end has come, and it was an amazing ending. I’m speaking about the season finale of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.  The episode was chock full of action, suspense, answers and resolutions – everything a season closer should have.  Before you continue reading I want to point out two things:  if you don’t watch the show, most of the rest of this will not make sense; if you do watch the show but haven’t watch the finale, then this may spoil some things for you.  So if you fall into either of the aforementioned categories, you best stop here.

Throughout the season, the story arc has been well orchestrated and has built a strong and believeable canon.  And by the penultimate episode, several elements were poised for a climactic conflict – the Dollhouse continued to operate unaware of its own flaws, both Paul Ballard and Alpha were poised to step forward and get what they were after, and Echo has subtlely been more than she is expected to be.  On Friday night, it all came to a head revealing several mysteries in the process (including some that we may not have realized were mysteries to begin with).

This finale was a perfect conclusion to the current arc (though hopefully not the series as a whole – see prior post).  And the action started before the episode even began.  Last weeks episode, “Briar Rose”, was an artful set to the thrilling spike that was “Omega” which continued nearly off the very heals of its predecessor.  Following prior Paul’s infiltration and the revelation that his agoraphobic accomplice is none other than the inconspicuous Alpha, the Dollhouse has to gain control of the chaos in their laps (including Victor’s medical status, Echo’s absence, and Paul’s presence).  Interwoven with the efforts to piece together the present puzzle, there are flashbacks to the confluence of events that led to Alpha’s original breakdown and escape.  And while Ballard is busy convincing Topher that there is more to a person than a map of their brain, Alpha attempts to make a Bonnie to his Clyde out of Echo (or as he put it the Omega to his Alpha – hence the title).

After Alpha’s plans backfire (sorry for the spoiler, but hey – you were warned … and you should have seen it coming anyway), the denouement includes Alpha being shelved, November being set free, Echo returning to the hen house, and Paul possibly finding an unlikely new place to roost.  Along the way we also discovered that Amy Acker’s Dr. Saunders is actually a doll version of the previous doctor (who happened to be played by George Frankly from MathNet), that Chrissy Seaver can hack it as an adult actress, and that serial killers shouldn’t be used as actives – especially in engagements fulfilling someone else’s serial killer fantasy.  I just hope that Fox sees the forest through the trees with this one and give the show another season to find its audience.  Otherwise this precipice to the next chapter is just an amazing ending.