I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KING’S X-Ear Candy (1996).

I think of Ear Candy as King’s X most upbeat record musically. Even the cover is upbeat!  It’s their first cover in ages which isn’t dark and forbidding.  It actually has a white border!  And of course, it’s hard to miss the psychedelic, brightly colored scarab beetle.

And the music matches the cover really well.  The opener, “The Train” is a catchy bit of near psychedelic rock which brings Ty’s vocal to the front.  It seems to set the tone for the rest of the album.  Even “Picture” contains a simple guitar riff reminiscent of the joy of Out of the Silent Planet.

I’m jumping down to “Mississippi Moon,” one of their supremely pretty songs ala “Goldilox.”  It’s more of a bluesy ballad, but the chorus is just amazing.

“A Box” continues the loveliness from the beginning of the album.  Its message, that there’s no room inside a box, seems to apply to the band’s more claustrophobic sounds as of late.  But lest you think they’ve gone soft, “Looking for Love” is a fabulous rocker, which makes me think of Thin Lizzy. 

Ear Candy also features “American Cheese (Jerry’s Pianto)” a rare track with Jerry Gatskill on lead vocals.  It contains the most Beatlesque sounds of a band that is full of Beatlesque sounds.  This one maintains a great deal more psychedelia than previous songs.  It’s not prog rock by any means, it’s just straight up psychedelia.

Lyrically, Doug opens up about his loss of faith; “Run” addresses it directly: “Yeah she told me, that if I wasn’t good He would get me, make me pay for everything I did, and she said that everybody bad would burn in Hell. I did what she told me and I became someone else.”

Despite the negative feelings in the above song, musically the album is very positive: a lot of the distorted riffs are toned down, and the album feels less angry.  I think this disappoints some of the band’s fans, but it retains such authentic King’s X sounds that it’s hard to argue with it.

[READ: September 5, 2008] “Springtide,” “Other People’s Money,” “The Position” “Factory” & “Abstract”.

In 2007, Forbes magazine asked five authors to write about this scenario: “It’s the year 2027, and the world is undergoing a global financial crisis. The scene is an American workplace.” I discovered these stories when I was looking up some information about Max Barry (I had just read Company). I was surprised to see that the stories were in Forbes, but whatever.  When I saw that there were five authors given the assignment I decided to try all five.

Max Barry-“Springtide”

This story concerns the Do Me Dolls, which are what Bratz dolls we be like in twenty years. The protagonist is Gordy Franklin, the creator of a marketing campaign that hyperstimulates the target audience (4 to 10 year old girls). If one girl wants one, all of her friends want one exponentially more. It works so well, that the girls essentially have destroyed, well, the world in their quest for dolls.

Gordy is currently in his penthouse trying to score with a young girl who is transfixed by the scenes of destruction down below. Her bra is virtually impossible to remove. And then everything shifts.

There are so many twists in this 4 page story.   The surprises keep coming right up to the end.   It’s a very funny piece.   Quite wicked.  I encourage you to read it; it’s fun and very short! And it’s available here.

Cory Doctorow-“Other People’s Money”

This is my second Cory Doctorow story (this is before I read Little Brother).  I enjoyed “Scroogled” very much.  This one was a little too insider-speak (in terms of venture capital) for me to really appreciate.

The story concerns Gretl, a woman who crafts art out of garbage, specifically old technological items (cell phones and what not).  She explains, “You watched them go from fetish item to six-for-a-buck in the blister packs at the pharmacy check out.  This gives them back their dignity.”  Gretl is being hit up by a Venture Capitalist to try and get her to make more money.

The story is primarily a dialog between these two.  There are some really funny concepts thrown around, and I loved the that you could quadruple your money is you had some money but if you got a ton of money it would just sit there languishing.

On a second reading the story made a bit more sense.  It just took getting my bearings of the jargon in the venture capital world.  It left a nice taste in my mouth.  It’s available here.

Warren Ellis-“The Position”

I actually thought that Warren Ellis might be the cohort of Nick Cave, but instead he turned out to be the author of Hellblazer amongst many other graphic novels (which makes more sense than the musician, really).  This story is only a page and a half long.  It concerns a few moments on the Stock Exchange floor in which the VP decides to put all of the money into one stock in an attempt to save the failing market.  There’s a funny twist at the end, which, as you might expect, is dark and twisted.  Available here.

[And as I’m writing this our government is planning to bail out Wall Street. perhaps this story is more prescient than I realized]

Lowell Yaeger-“Factory”

This was the longest story of the bunch (12 pages).  Not only had I never heard of Lowell Yaeger, but even trying to find information or a picture of him proved impossible!  Which is a shame as this story was great.

The set up is fantastic: it is told in the first person, and it is littered with “Facts.”  As in,

Fact:A ream of orange-colored Brite-Lite paper cost $23.99 on sale at the local PaperMax before it closed its doors. That’s about $15 more than what it cost when I was a kid.

The reason that is useful is that the narrator just got his pink slip, even though it was served on orange paper.

In 2027, the country is in tatters, cities are in trouble, the grid is mostly down, and the only thriving business in rural Pennsylvania, where the story is set, is a toilet paper factory, because, well, people gotta wipe.  So, the fact that the narrator is getting laid off looks pretty bad for his family.

Part Two of the story has the employees planning a reaction to their mass layoffs.

Part Three comes when the entire company confronts the owner about the layoffs.  He insists that the company has no money and the bank is foreclosing on them.  There’s nothing they can do.  But he also insists that he’s not going to let anyone take his company away from him.  And that’s where the story shifts gears and gets very exciting.  A great story, right up to the last line.  I really enjoyed it, and it’s available here.

Michael Bagnulo-“Abstract”

I’ve never read anything by Michael Bagnulo before.  This story was really great.  A wonderful sci-fi mindfuck.  It begins with a quote from Philosophical Quarterly.  One point the quote makes is “(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.”

The story proceeds from there with Trevor, the universally reviled co-worker, proposing that this group of co-workers create a computer simulated office to run all of their tasks.  A software company, Stint, will host this virtual company, and, once they supply data from their own lives to make their virtual counterpoints, the virtual office will be up and running, doing all of their menial tasks for them. The co-workers start to get freaked about the amount of detail that they have to provide, but Trevor insists that it’s all necessary.

And the virtual office works quite well, until things from the virtual world start appearing in the real world.  Even lies that some of them told are becoming true.

I found the beginning of the story to be somewhat awkward, but by the end, I was totally into it.  It was a lot of fun trying to figure out what was happening.

One gripe, which may be Forbes‘ fault: there were at least three typos in the story.  Irritating.  Aside from that it was really good.  And, it’s available here.