It can now be told that Prometheus is very much the Alien prequel it was presumed to be all along, but a prequel in the sense that it lives on the same timeline as the Alien universe resides. One movie does not end to begin the next, and yet there will be significant linkage to force the fans of Scott’s 1979 breakthrough into multiplex seats.  Put it this way, this is not how Darth Vader came to be and then we see where that led. This would be more about the great-great-grandparents of Anakin Skywalker, to draw the analogy with the broadest strokes. This is about the stuff that happened way before the stuff.

What has been so great about how everything’s been handled up to this point is not what we’ve been told. It started with Scott’s initial statements of wanting to revisit that specific dark corner of the universe again, and fanboy nation lit up with glee over the prospect of more Alien films with the man that started it all.

It’s been a long time since the thought of going back there to LV-426 has been a good one, but not for lack of trying. James Cameron did surprisingly well by the premise, but that was because he understood it. Scott didn’t make a science-fiction movie initially, but instead made an Agatha Christie mystery set in a haunted house in space. That’s Alien in a nutshell. Cameron then made a war drama that was equal parts a broken-family drama, only it played out in a creepy crawly hive full of xenomorphs. Those who followed them had no wiggle room for reinvention, so David Fincher (Alien III) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, The City of Lost Children) & Joss Whedon (yes, that Joss Whedon was a writer for Alien Resurrection) were stuck making Alien movies that were movies about Alien. They were saddled with the literal.

The Alien vs. Predator flicks that came after were little more than the over-stimulated wet dreams of the fan market too agitated to know that what they wanted and what was actually good were two separate things. They got explosions, carnage, star creeps, and that was it. It was a salad with no vegetables; all bacon bits and croutons, and it had equal capacity to nauseate. It also had the very strong possibility of destroying two of Fox’s most recognizable franchises (which is probably being very generous to Predator, which really only has the John McTiernan original to stand up for it).

Rant begins. I will leave this point alone for the most part, but would say that Fox had any number of ridiculously tempting possibilities on their table when it came to the Predator series, and faced with such a tempting array, they ate the packet of crackers instead, giving us gory b-movie fare instead. There was a whole societal order that could have been developed to make something damned near epic, and what did they do? They made a bunch of movies about a space Rastafarian that, like Ted Nugent, likes to hunt because “I likes ta hunt.” Rant ends.

It was a great time for Scott to step back into this realm because, frankly, it couldn’t get any worse. And any marketing division of any studio would give their eyeteeth, first-born and probably a testicle (perhaps not their own, but still) to pump Ridley Scott’s Return To Alien! Yet it didn’t go like that. The script was kept in a perpetual state of lockdown. No images were emerging, secrecy was sworn, and the primary thrust of press was that there was no press. Scott himself made denial his modus operandi, insisting the rules had changed. This was not an Alien movie, there’s nothing to see here, and bugger off.

Nobody is going to tell Ridley Scott what to do, but you can rightly imagine Fox wanted to, and wanted to very, very badly. Modern movie marketing now begins before the script is even completed. The treatment isn’t even emailed over before the marketing department is spreading the word around. On-set photos and details are disseminated, divulged and dissected on the internet before formal casting has even been finalized, and the final trailer for the movie winds up being more a two-minute version with a beginning, a middle, and far too much of an ending for anyone to even care about plunking down the $12-$15 dollars for a ticket afterward. Some of the worst experiences I’ve had at the movies in the past decade have been watching trailers that start off as intriguing, wind up telling me too much, and in the end make actually viewing the film superfluous. I saw it. It was the trailer, it was a free viewing and, frankly, it sucked.

The most masterful thing about Prometheus is that it has told us only what we needed to know at any given moment. It is science-fiction. It has basis in previous material. It will be similar in spirit to any number of previous efforts but might not actually be a part of those. Only recently has it come to light that, yes, this is the place where the Alien saga begins, but is not the most direct of descendants. Large parts of that info was not told to us, but was teased out and hinted at in the trailers, and because we weren’t told the entire story beforehand, we actually watched the trailers, searching for clues, making up assumptions and forging connections, and we talked about how it could pair up with our beliefs and preconceptions. In other words, everything that has come out up to this point has been carefully put out crumb-by-crumb to get you to actually go into the trap, which was what trailers and marketing were supposed to be about. They weren’t about giving you the YouTube edition.

So even if Prometheus ends up as disappointing, it has given back the audience of 2012 one thing it once had (or heard about) – the mystery and expectation of going to see a movie. The possibility of walking into the screening with a bunch of questions and almost no answers is a pleasing one, and one I hope Fox and the rest of Hollywood takes to heart. The audience wants to want.

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I had originally set out to write an entry into our series Call It A Comeback, and it was to be about the J. Geils Band. The problem with that is there really wasn’t much of a comeback to speak of. Many people knew about the band’s ’70s output and some of their rock radio hits from that time period, and by that accounting the “Bad Boys of Boston” were doing pretty well. Let’s get real though — unless you were already fans of the band, their Atlantic Records output was usually something you flipped past in the record racks on the way to something else.

That stuff, starting with 1970′s The J. Geils Band and closing with 1977′s Monkey Island, had a distinctive blues-r&b flavor but also had a jovial, freewheeling touch to identify itself with. The band was less a hardcore soul-rock outfit than were, say, The Blues Brothers or The Commitments. They were a bunch of white fellows that deeply loved this authentic sound but were, just as equally, the original party rockers (sorry, LMFAO). They could swing it and bring it, but they were goofy too, and would possibly have played for a keg of beer as readily as for straight pay.

The two primary elements of their sound during this period came from the guitar of the band’s namesake, (John) Geils and harmonica player Richard “Magic Dick” Salwitz. You can hear Magic Dick knock it out of the park on a cover of “Whammer Jammer” from the 1971 record The Morning After. Geils was also recognized as a pretty hot guitar-player, and yet neither member seemed as essential to what would become the group’s biggest period; the “comeback” that essentially wasn’t. After a decade of solid work and middling achievement, they finally came into their own but didn’t sound quite like the band of old.

(Ain’t Nothin’ But A) House Party

Give It To Me

Whammer Jammer

It is thanks mostly to vocalist Peter Wolf and keyboardist Seth Justman, the latter of the two becoming the most integral to their success with a large hand in the writing of their poppier material, and an array of synth-keys that would become more and more predominant in their sound. Yet the opening salvo of this new attitude came with Geils in full stomp-mode on the title track of 1980′s Love Stinks, only their second release from new label EMI. Though more lighthearted and accessible, there is not much distance between the song and AC/DC’s “Back In Black,” another guitar stomp of the times. The pivot point comes from Justman’s keys, a leavener for what is arguably the group’s heaviest-sounding moment. And who of a certain demographic has not (in a fit of insouciance or baldfaced jiltedness) wanted to blast the tune out very loudly? “I’ve been through diamonds, I’ve been through minks, I’ve been through it all!,” Wolf rants, bringing it down with a pissy groan, “Love stinks.”

Overall, that is the song people most remember from the record and probably little else, but it was enough to reshape what they expected from the band. Certain aspects of old remained. They were still party rock and they still liked blues and soul, but they deferred it to get the recognition they needed. Some might say it was a sell-out and others might call it an act of survival. It depends on how you felt about the band prior to their transformation. “Love Stinks” wasn’t a #1 pop chart hit but brought The J. Geils Band back to the attention of rock radio which had been casually overlooking them later in the Seventies. They wouldn’t be so easily denied with their next entry.

Love Stinks

Desire (Please Don’t Turn Away)

With EMI now secure that their acquisition of the band was not a mistake, they must have had some influence in keeping what had begun going: build up what worked on Love Stinks, scale back what were the more traditional aspects, and make a monster. That monster was 1981′s Freeze Frame. It sported two hits, the title cut and a song that is so of-it’s-time that it probably has made itself impossible to be covered with a straight face. That song was “Centerfold.” In it, Wolf seethes about realizing his high school sweetheart has decided to pose for the centerfold of a naughty magazine. He found out about it by looking through that naughty magazine, by the way, and the crux of his angst is that the whole world was getting a good hard look at his “homeroom angel” naked as the day she was born.

The song is a fun track, tied up with a whistle-coda and filled all over with Justman’s keyboards. It is also a fairly sexist sentiment that runs through the lyrics. The guy in the song is mad that not just somebody, but anybody, could now see his old high school flame exposed, as if she should have been forced to wear four layers of clothing for the rest of her days after their backseat fidaddle. His solution to this conundrum is to seek out the young, comely lass and hook up with her again, which has all the romantic implications of a house cat that drank too much milk setting out to mark its territory. Another thing that firmly sets the track in the early-1980s is the framing device of the magazine. In the digital age, going to a newsstand to gawk at Playboy Magazine seems almost quaint. These drag down the songs when you think about them too much, and luckily for the band, you don’t. They remain fun, often funny, little bits of pop — misogynist though they might be.

Now understand that when the song, omnipresent upon it’s release, actually came out I would have been twelve years old. You may have been also, and possibly younger, so let us dismiss this idea that our children are listening to the most degraded, amoral garbage ever recorded right now. We listened to a song about a dude who checked out a magazine, ostensibly with which to get his jollies, only to find he knew the model inside, and his first instinct is to go get some of that and assert his dominance over her sexy little bod — and we loved the song enough to make it a huge hit. Moralizing over what R-rated thing Rihanna just sang loses a lot of its power now, doesn’t it?

Centerfold

Flamethrower

An aside — during their promotional jaunt for Freeze Frame, the band appeared on The Joe Franklin Show, a late-night show featuring the affable, if somewhat stodgy, host that is probably more recognized for the impression Billy Crystal used to do of him on Saturday Night Live. Franklin was more likely to have as guests old school Broadway stars, crooners, Bobby Short on piano, for Pete’s sake. He didn’t have stage room for bands to perform and he didn’t seem to have much interest for bands to begin with, and yet there they were, sitting on his tiny brown couch, wearing the overalls they wore in the “Freeze Frame” video. It was surreal and kind of awesome all at once, mostly because Franklin in his best “showbiz is awesome” work ethic hadn’t a clue what the hell was going on right there. I don’t think the band knew for sure either. Cringe TV at it’s most glorious, without a doubt. I don’t remember if Franklin referred to Magic Dick by name.

Another thing that survived the band’s changeover was their inherent goofiness, on Love Stinks‘ spoken-word “No Anchovies Please” and Freeze Frame‘s closing “Piss On The Wall.” What wasn’t getting as much love was the harmonica work of Magic Dick, who gets two standout moments on Freeze Frame and is relegated mostly to background color thereafter: “Rage In The Cage” and the album’s best offering, “Flamethrower,” a tune that is absolutely begging for a cover from Prince. My favorite track from Love Stinks, on the other hand, hearkens back to a bluesier side, being the ballad “Desire (Please Don’t Turn Away).” I mention these tracks particularly because the J. Geils Band’s “comeback” was coming to a close whether they knew it or not. It would come with an album that sounds the least like anything they had done before.

Getting the bulk of the attention, Peter Wolf went solo and had a hit with the song “Lights Out.” Justman took control of the band as frontman and, from that, we got You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd. While he may not have been the most technically proficient vocalist, Wolf had charisma and attitude, both carrying him through whichever song he was singing. In contrast, Justman sounds thin and unconfident, and even if he had been a major part of bringing the J. Geils Band to prominence, he sounds uncomfortably out of place in his new position as the frontman. You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd seemed to hang around the shops for a long time, and I can imagine the store owners saying to the indifferent customers, “But you loved this band only a couple years ago!” Maybe, but it just wasn’t the same band anymore.

The J. Geils Band has reunited several times since then, but has never recorded another album. I’m never one to say a band shouldn’t record new material, believing part of being a functional, responsible band is being a band that continues to write and record. And yet, there is something appropriate to the group leaving things where they are now, and only on certain occasions taking out the hits and giving them a flash. They had a great run, and the second leg of the journey was more successful than the first, but times have changed. Like undressed women in a magazine, The J. Geils Band seem a piece of something from then, not of now.

Eenie Meenie Minie Moe

The Bite From Inside

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To answer that, we need to look clear-eyed at what the movie market is right now. There are movies for everyone now, but not a single movie that everyone agrees on. That fracturing has spilled across the landscape of the cineplex where, once, a family went to the movies together. Now they split off and go see the feature that was tailored for them. Of this splintering, the once consistent goal of studios is to have the franchise that appeals to the golden 14-21 year old market. This is the demographic that is gladly moving from Scholastic Book series such as Harry Potter (a coming of age series about a boy in strange, adult dangers and situations), Twilight (a soap opera), and The Hunger Games (youths thrown into the violence of war before they are equipped to comprehend it) right to box office bonanzas. Where the scope of these was once meant for a wider range of ages, now the films are firmly meant to connect with the pre-teen and teen demographic, possibly to the exclusion of people 25-and-up.

Into this comes John Carter, Burroughs’ story of a Civil War fighter magically transposed to Mars, or as the inhabitants know it, Barsoom. Under the hot desert sun of Barsoom is everything you would think a young teenage male could want: action, setpieces, spaceships, special effects, and scantily clad girls. What a teenage boy might not be so keen on being seen going to is a movie fronted by a scantily clad guy, but the character of John Carter has been seemingly pulled directly from a teenage girl’s fan magazine. One suspects that the people at Disney saw this as a way of getting both the boys and the girls to see it.

That’s not how it works. In the world of teenage politics, the guy wants a movie with other rough and tough guys shooting stuff, driving cool vehicles and wearing slick body armor and outfits. They want the girls to wear little to nothing. This is why Michael Bay keeps making lots and lots of money. The girl wants to be with the guy and so she acquiesces to going to this loud, shiny travesty with him.

Conversely, the girl wants to go see a movie she can relate to with mysterious boyfriends that pull the female protagonists out of their mundane existences. The guy doesn’t want to see that, but if he’s ever going to get to second base, he’ll suffer through the throngs of sparkly vampires, and that is also how you get both sexes to pay for the ticket. You do not try to appeal to them both at once.

But that’s what Disney attempts here by mixing a sci-fi manchild actioner with a beefcake lead role. Worse, Taylor Kitsch who plays John Carter doesn’t look like a Civil War veteran. He looks like a mix between Conan the Barbarian and one of those creepy-loungey dudes on the Abercrombie & Fitch ads. The other thing that Disney did was to pull way back from Burroughs’ original conception of the inhabitants of Barsoom who are, uh, er, nekkid as jaybirds. Witness the many, many, many comic interpretations of the lead female character of Dejah Thoris (the “Princess of Mars” that this first book/movie focuses on). Even they have to pull back from Burroughs, but still languish in a middle-school mentality of titillation (yeah, I know what I wrote there). So the fact that the lead male character is running around in a loin-cloth essentially while the female is practically prudish by comparison makes little sense.

Disney’s done this before though, specifically with the adaptation of the comic series The Rocketeer wherein the lead character’s love interest is modeled after pin-up queen Bettie Page. In the film she is turned into a thoroughly chaste Jennie, as played by Jennifer Connelly. I think the movie still works as a bit of a throwback, fun adventure, but it bombed and is considered an afterthought in the Disney archive. Am I saying that Disney should have attempted an all-naked sci-fi film in John Carter, just for the sake of being true to the source material? No, of course not, but if they were going to pull back in one aspect, they should have pulled back in others to maintain an equilibrium. They could have both the male and female characters in outfits that said “space adventure” of some sort (but that would likely have shown how much of Flash Gordon had been cribbed from the John Carter novels). Instead, they wanted to have it both ways and got neither. With The Rocketeer, they had to pull back because the character upon which Jennie was based wasn’t going to make it in a Disney film without severe controversy. Then again, perhaps it should have been one of their subsidiaries at that time, Touchstone or Hollywood Pictures.

As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, opening weekend has become a place where it is about being seen. You go to show off. You put on your best sneakers, your skinniest jeans, your best shirt, maybe some gold if you’re feeling ostentatious. You’re not going to go to a movie that’s going to make you look bad. People are watching and, on Monday, people will talk. If you are or have ever been in high school, you’re already aware of this. Movies are an entertainment, yes; but they’re also a fashion statement. You listen to the hot hits on your iPod, you spray the latest cologne/perfume on and blend in, and you go to the movie that won’t make you look weak. It may not be the easiest thing to test-market for, this ephemeral definition of coolness, because it seems to be changing by the minute. However, if you insist on making movies so slavishly and narrowly engineered, you had better try.

Here’s the thing though. Like The Rocketeer, John Carter is not awful. It’s not what I could call an epic for the ages, but if you dug the old Hercules TV series, you would enjoy this. It may find an audience on DVD, and I expect that in true Disney fashion it will quietly be dumped on the home video market in a month or two like so much trash in the river, in an unheralded single-disc, movie-only ceremonial washing of the hands. For all of Hollywood’s test marketing and previewing and reworking, Disney failed to understand the targets they were purportedly aiming for, and for that lack of critical thinking now have to figure out how to justify the loss of a couple hundred million dollars.

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Tagging along on his trek to visit his former owner, now sick and at the hospital, Snoopy’s bird friend Woodstock makes his debut.

The songs for the film were composed by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, who cut their musical teeth at Disney, providing more memorable tunes than is easily able for one to process. Their sometimes difficult working and familial relationships were documented in the 2009 film The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story.  That film dealt mostly with their Disney work, and while Columbia Records did (at one time) release Snoopy Come Home‘s soundtrack, it has been out of print for a very long time.

Popdose has a way of stepping in to fill voids such as these so, without further delay, we present the Sherman Brothers’ songs from Snoopy Come Home as well as instrumental cues that were not on the original soundtrack release. Enjoy.

Snoopy Come Home

At The Beach

No Dogs Allowed I - Thurl Ravenscroft

Letter To The Editor

No Dogs Allowed II - Thurl Ravenscroft

Snoopy Acts Up

Do You Remember Me (Lila’s Theme) – Shelby Flint

Me And You

No Dogs Allowed III - Thurl Ravenscroft

On The Road

Fundamental Friend Dependability

We’re The Best Of Buddies

Do You Remember Me Reprise

Near The Hospital

No Dogs Allowed IV - Thurl Ravenscroft

Charlie Brown’s Calliope

It Changes

On The Road II

No Dogs Allowed V

A Good Excuse As Any

A Long Way To Tipperary-Me And You

End Credits

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Some, if not all, have asked me why I am so cynical. Why do you always believe, given the chance to do well or to do harm, humans will do harm, they wonder aloud. In defense of my negativity, we have seen all through human history the inherent man’s-inhumanity-to-man. I reply with Emmett Till, Victor Jara, the children who were strapped to their car seats when their mother pushed the car into the lake. For some, Cain slew his brother Abel. For others, better caves were acquired by beating in the heads of the occupants with rocks.

I promise you, the rest of this post won’t be as much of a downer…maybe. I suppose it all depends on how much kum-bah-yah you require to exist upon. I do expect you will feel a slight bit of uplift knowing you couldn’t possibly be as dumb as the people who either vilified or supported the following examples.

Rebecca Black “Friday” – Just about a year ago, young Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” landed on YouTube. To say it was a hit is an understatement. To say it was particularly good is an overstatement. It is, above all, a song performed by an unseasoned thirteen-year-old girl and, as such, could have been far, far worse than it is. There is a reason why my cassette recordings from my youth spontaneously combusted into flame, smoke, and curdled blobs of plastic.

Yup, I had no hand in that at all.

You are not stupid to have watched the video. You’re not even stupid if you admit to liking it a little bit. I don’t particularly like it myself, but I like that Black pursued her dreams as she did. Too bad I am a minority on this, as the song quickly became an internet meme, the butt of jokes, and believe it or not, the instigation of online death threats against Black. Adult television celebrities openly and cruelly mocked her song and her as if their youthful efforts didn’t bite it (heck, some of these “adults” professional efforts still bite it!) Black’s parents withdrew her from school and she is now being taught at home. This is to protect her from the taunting and abuse that came in tandem with her pursuit.

But kids are cruel by nature and are, therefore, exempt because they’re too young not to be so stupid, right? Follow me, Ebenezer. There are three shadows more.

Coca Cola Christmas Can – This past Christmas season Coca Cola introduced a holiday-themed can based on their perennially popular polar bear characters. The can was actually kind of an elegant design, but it was also a shiny, silver one. The marketing team at Coca Cola probably assumed, “Well, nobody’s going to simply ingest products without reading the contents of the label, right?”

Wrong! An outpouring of anger forced the company to withdraw the design and replace the cans with the standard red cans. It seems that the ‘erudite’ purchasing community did, in fact, run to the store and buy the regular Coke believing it was the Diet Coke, all the while probably thinking (if only to remind their little pea-brains), “Diet silver! Me buy silver! Me drink silver! Me good consumer!” The complaints ranged from slightly peeved of the “that was a poor choice in design” variety all the way up to claims of nefarious conspiracies of keeping America obese. After all, we have no control over what we ingest. Packaging designers lift the products to our mouths and make us eat it.

On the plus side, some stores still have some cans left. #FutureCollectorsItem

The Artist – They also make us watch brand-new black and white silent films! Oh mercy! Several audiences were up in arms with the Weinstein Company and their distribution of the Oscar-nominated film The Artist. Nobody told them it was a silent film in black and white; not the black and white posters for it, nor the marketing campaigns that touted a “modern black and white silent film,” nor all the critics and write-ups that specified it was a silent, black & white movie. Through all of those warnings, nobody told them! Nobody!! Demands were, once again, made. Threats of lawsuits promised. Somewhere out there, Vin Diesel readies The Fast And The Furious Six, rubs his hands insidiously, and cackles, “Muahhh-haah-haaahhh!!”

The Artist should have been rated R-G: Goobers not permitted without a guardian with at least a high school education.

Those Who Continue To Make Excuses For The Republican Candidates For President of the United States – I’ll try not to get too political here. Pres. Obama was not the savior so many were hoping for. He got a lot wrong in his first term. He also got a lot right, but it really has nothing to do with him. If a competent, relevant, and relatively trustworthy conservative competitor was up against him, it wouldn’t really have anything to do with them either. Nor does it have much to do with the pack of presumed candidates of pseudo-intellectuals and money-shufflers.

It’s all about those who still claim today, as they claimed when Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain were in the race (and Donald Trump kept flirting with), that any one of them would be better than Obama.

I have several very conservative friends who say, unequivocally, that they cannot in good conscience vote for Obama but will not vote for any of their own candidates. Why, asked I. “Because they all suck,” they say. “They suck, and the RNC sucks for not banning them somehow and demanding at least one worthwhile contender. They have tried to deflect their hatred of the Democrats and bounce it off on us, making us the ones at fault for voting for such a bunch of losers, rather than taking the blame for mismanagement of their party.”

Another said, “I don’t intentionally seek out crap. I try to get the best. Why does the party I am affiliated with think so little of me that they would expect me to buy into these (jerks*)?”

(*Trust me – I severely cleaned it up for our more sensitive readership.)

And yet there is still a small army out there that say this F-Team, bench-riding, last-place, nose-picking, mouth-breathing, soldier-bashing, grandma-evicting, cancer-patient-ignoring lot of amoeboids is, one and all, better than Obama on his best day. They probably also enjoy drinking Drano accidentally, watch Charlie Chaplin films with the Insane Clown Posse dubbed over, and have on more than one occasion issued fatwa upon tween-age children.

2012 may be our last year, but not because of Mayan apocalypse. We’re too stupid, as a species, to justify our continuance.

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Likewise, the fans do not want something that is so foreign and relatively experimental that none of this artist or group’s DNA finds a way to peer through. To make a return to the spotlight even marginally successful, one has to straddle these two. Copy your hits and you’re cynical and lazy. Go way the hell over yonder and you lose sight of whatever it was they loved you for in the first place. This was the fear that hung over Van Halen Mach IV’s A Different Kind Of Truth, an album that returns David Lee Roth to the mic and finds Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang manning the bass.

The group never was the sentimental type anyway, as evidenced in early tunes like “Bottoms Up” and “Everybody Wants Some.” The thought of these elder statesmen of rock (and stare at that phrase awhile…let it burrow into your psyche like a parasite) preening and prancing about and lusting after girls who could be their daughters was not a pleasant prospect. But then again, neither was the concept of a slow, loping drag of a collection that snuggled into those flannel jammies, sipped tea at noon with a side of Nilla wafers, and casually bragged about “what we was.” What was the way forward? Was there a way forward at all or was this merely, as many in this crowd assumed, so much cashing in that famous namecheck, trotting out the oldies on tour, and purporting that it wasn’t really that way because, hey, we’ve got a new album, right?

Right. Very right, in fact.

Van Halen has a new album out and the hopeful pessimists like myself are breathing a sigh of relief. It is not a chaste volume of old timey recollections and boasts, nor the most inappropriate series of jailbait come-ons ever devised half-drunk at three in the morning. It walks the whisper-thin wire of being both and neither, and most importantly, it presents the hardest, wildest boot up the bum these people have produced in decades. As a matter of fact, if one said in the past that VH was a hard rock-pop group (and they were for the most part), they would need to recalculate for A Different Kind Of Truth. This is about as metal as the band has ever been and I, for one, am not complaining.

There are nods to the past, but they remain only nods. The first couple listens to the track “You And Your Blues” recalled “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” but refused to linger there, and Roth’s voice showing the age and abuse of many hard-partying years fits the mood of the piece extremely well. His gruff be-bop on “Stay Frosty” is meant to trigger thoughts of “Ice Cream Man,” and they do. When the band punches in, however, the tune becomes a barnstormer and fully allays any fears that this was going to be the softer AOR bow on an otherwise quite aggressive set. On the track “China Town,” Wolfgang Van Halen earns his rank by tearing through a bassline more complex than anything this band has ever done on the low-end. “Big River” has a thunderous, feel-good stomp and a simple sing-along hook of a chorus, and closing “Beats Workin’” applies dumb smiles to faces as it winds its way to conclusion.

Is this the perfect comeback? Well, I can’t say that entirely. Sometimes Roth attempts some lines he just hasn’t the stamina for anymore, and brother does it show. Several years back when Wolfgang joined and Roth came back for the reunion tour, comedian Jim Norton did a parody song called, “We’re Back (And We’re Better Than Ever!)” which slathered on every awful reunion trope conceivable. A Different Kind Of Truth features the rather weak “Blood and Fire” that unfortunately brings Norton’s prediction to fruition. It’s not awful, but it remains the limpest of the bunch, and of the thirteen tracks I heard on the disc, it’s the one that easily nominates itself for exclusion.

With that in mind, the impressive detail is that the rest of the songs do not falter as easily. The band itself goes for the proverbial “it” at every turn, and Eddie Van Halen hasn’t sounded this alive since OU812. The perennially underrated Alex Van Halen shoots up fireworks all through the album. When it needs groove, he grooves. When it needs to boogie, he boogies; and when it is just plain time to be mean to the kit and destroy, he aims to maim. For a frustrated one-time drum student like myself, it is a joy to listen to him flip the rhythm as he does on the opening of “As Is.”

In the past few years I have had the greasy-faced teen in me built up and torn down, over and over, by old favorites who returned to the stage, each time promising things only partially delivered if at all. Chalk it up to the onset of a midlife crisis, where I want to feel like I did without retreating into the dark recesses of regression. Can’t the bands of my youth just get back out there and make good records again? Is that so hard to do and too much to ask? Apparently not because, while it’s not a perfect record or even a perfect Van Halen record, A Different Kind Of Truth is wonderfully cathartic, full of the pyrotechnics of a younger band, but not in denial of where they stand in the present.

Download A Different Kind Of Truth from Amazon.com.

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It is said that if you wait long enough, a trend will fall out of fashion, be ridiculed, then wind up being a trend all over again. I suppose it is true, only one is hesitant to start lumping musical forms in as “trends.” It feels very dismissive and something dictated by whim and not by need. For example, I found myself missing the primacy of rock guitars during a recent viewing of the Cameron Crowe-assembled Pearl Jam Twenty.

Let me just say how weird it is to watch a documentary set in the times in which you have lived. Many of us see the documentary as the expression of times long gone and people now dead—just think of nearly everything Ken Burns has ever done and you’ll get where I’m thinking. But here is a film that immediately drops me into a time I remember living through, those last days of hair metal where longhaired, mirror-shaded miscreants danced funny and sang of getting drunk and screwed sloppy. We also had the pop acts that, when they were still making headlines, were also most reflective of an illusion of the 1980s than the actual era. Into that came the feedback of guitar played loud, angry, not flashy but with a lot of energy.

It was kind of weird, really. A brother of mine who is dyed-in-the-wool metal appreciated Nirvana’s Nevermind for all of a few months. I recall us driving to my grandmother’s for Christmas with the tape playing through a half-dozen times. Pearl Jam’s Ten stuck around longer than that, but it too eventually went by the wayside. My brother Dan would drift back to Metallica, Overkill and Testament, but the larger populace would stay with the alternative rock acts for a longer time. We didn’t know how good we had it.

Matter-of-fact, we did an awful lot of complaining during that period, about who was true and who was selling out, about what the difference between an artist and a rock star is, about who was good, great, or sucked. And sure, there was a lot of music that truly was horrible at that time; they came, they saw, they went home and whined into microphones and slammed barre chords into their Sears guitars, and they wound up with recording contracts. That may be too simplistic an assessment, but it felt that way. We probably should have been grateful, even for the wanna-bes.

The music scene, such as it is, is so automated that even jokes about auto-tune no longer apply. Most pop songs are so over-produced and over-processed; to hear a guitar strum somewhere in the mix seems like a really big deal now. And even so, there’s still some good stuff happening, even if it is 90% synthetic. I refuse to fall into the trap of saying “everything made now is garbage,” because it is just not true.

But I have lived through a few musical cycles now where the guitar was the dominant force: most certainly the 1970’s was the most pervasive, followed by the alterna-90s. After that, the 1980s had enough guitars in tow to remind you it existed in the first half of the decade (bunched up against a whole lot of synth that has aged extremely poorly). The hard-rockers were rather in their glory for the second half, but only small portions of their efforts seem to reach me now. I listen to it still for memory’s sake, but some of it is just so silly and embarrassing. How did we ever think girls would like us just because we liked that stuff?

Finally, we had the early 2000’s microburst that was, really, nothing at all. In it there were White Stripes, Strokes, Hives and Vines, but darn little of lasting consequence (only the White Stripes has lasted long enough for anybody to get too gooey about the band’s eventual demise. The Strokes still exist but, right now, does anyone care enough to acknowledge it?) Where we stand now is mostly a guitar-free zone so far as the major pop charts are concerned.

And even the underground seems vastly different. Remember when blogs like Pitchfork seemed to revel solely in the most arch of independent music, and those who liked anything else were as stupid as the artists they liked? Today, they are a friendlier environment, which in itself is not a bad thing. They’re no longer the bitchy arbiters of what is good and what is worthless. But look at the stories that get the most frequent coverage on the site and you’ll recognize the change immediately. Odd Future with Tyler The Creator, a rapper, tends to show up the most, followed by singers who are far more glamorous than what used to pass for Pitchfork’s oeuvre. Remember Courtney Love’s streaked makeup or Donita Sparks staring down a camera lens in contempt? Now see Lana Del Rey, Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine, and Elizabeth Harper of Class Actress, all of whom are magazine-shoot ready. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either, but when you recall that whole ‘90s “underground manifesto” aesthetic, glamour can be quite disorienting.

The overriding point is, of course, most of this music is key-and-sample driven with, at times, a guitar adding color, a world where O.K. Computer came and went, but Kid A stayed forever. Often the beat is a disco pulse and not a thunder drive. One more time: not a problem if the song is good, but I cannot help but miss that electric downstroke, the voice that belts out into the microphone, through the wires, ultimately out your speakers and into your brain.

So what is it then? I guess what I really miss is that communal aspect of the majority, or at least the majority I was in closest proximity to, liking that sound. Right now, the guitar just isn’t all that welcome, and by inexplicable extension, I don’t feel welcomed either. I recall different time frames where I could flip on a radio and what came out had a 50/50 chance of being instantly accepted. Now I just feel old, having seen the alternative realm overtaken by the Oonts-Oonts club kids, and no matter how hard I try to pump my fist, I can’t track the rhythm.

So if I could go back to the early 1990’s, I’d tell myself a few things. First, when Pearl Jam starts getting weird with Vitalogy, just roll with it and don’t be so critical. Appreciate Kurt Cobain while he’s here because it won’t be long. Sponge isn’t awful so quit complaining, and more often than not, Stone Temple Pilots is better than you first thought. Bush still sounds like bad Nirvana ripping-off, but Gavin Rossdale will marry Gwen Stefani, she’ll eclipse him with hyperpolished electropop, and he will be relegated to the world of being Mr. Stefani so, ha ha, joke’s on him.

Enjoy the ride, already. We may yet see the next wave of six-string slingers or we may not. But let’s try not to ruin the party before we even get there (he said to himself tentatively).

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In came their imprint Power Records. You think the battle lines between D.C. Comics and Marvel Comics is airtight, but at Power there was all kinds of inter-philanderin’ détente going on. Batman, Superman, Captain America, Spidey and, heck, let’s throw Conan The Barbarian, Star Trek and Space 1999 in there too, how ’bout it?

Now it is 2012 and “book” and “record” seem as compatible as “yoga position” and “wheat thresher,” but two people remember. Way Out Wednesday’s kiddie record guru Tony Redman and resident regressive and altogether suspicious subject Dw. Dunphy jump headlong into the jagged pile of vinyl from their collective youth…with Power! Read along with us, kids! Okay?!! (download PDF)

“Stacked Cards” from Batman (download)

Tony – I’m eager to hear this first story featuring the Joker. Is this silly Joker or scary Joker?

Dw. – Well, this came out more than a decade before Tim Burton’s Batman movie, but there is a slight similarity, story-wise, so let’s go with scary.

(0:00) Tony – I like the jazzy music at the start.

Dw. – It’s just like the beats all over again, bongos and everything. Ginsburg in blue tights. Ferlinghetti killing people. Exactly the same.

(0:31) Tony – Jeez, was Chief O’Hara too busy to hang around?

Dw. – Whenever there’s crime to solve, you know where Chief O’Hara will be…hiding in the mens room with Catwoman’s mugshot.

(0:39) Tony – So does he know his vandals by the kinds of rocks they throw?

Dw. – “When you’ve been the law as long as I have, you’ve seen a lotta rocks lobbed at you…except for the ones that put you in a coma.”

(0:55) Tony – Nice shout out to Arkham. They at least know a little bit about the comics.

Dw. – Yeah, and the original book that came with this seems to have been drawn by Neal Adams. We should get confirmation from Johnny Bacardi on that one.

Johnny Bacardi – Judging by what I’ve seen after Googling it, I’d say it sure looks like Adams, unless some of the Crusty Bunkers (a collective of assistants he had in the mid-70′s) pitched in. Looks like Adams with (Dick) Giordano inks to me, though.

Dw. – Thanks, JB! (It’s so good to have experts on the staff…)

(1:09) Tony – Do you think the Joker really had to sign that note? I mean, it was pretty obvious who it was. And with all the bad guys around I’d think the Gotham City Police Station might have bulletproof glass (or at least rock proof).

Dw. – That was just Power Records teaching kids to be polite. Always remember to sign your death threats, kids.

(1:26) Tony – Oh yeah, a 306. What’s a 306, anyway? I couldn’t find that number specifically, but it would be between 288 (Lewd Conduct) and 311 (Indecent Exposure).

Dw. – It appears to be “Liability for conduct of another; complicity.” Wasn’t Complicity J.J. Abrams’ first TV show, with the pretty blonde with the long curly hair that always drove the getaway car?

(1:50) Tony – Wait a minute. Didn’t he contact the Commissioner already?

Dw. – Ain’t nothing funny about Alzheimer’s, you Peter Pan Records bastards…

(1:59) Tony – Where have I heard Robin’s voice before? It sounds like someone from a cartoon, but I can’t place it.

Dw. – It’s not Casey Kasem, or as I refer to him, America’s Gielgud…which reminds me. I have to go shut off the oven. You have to let your Gielgud rest for fifteen minutes so the juices redistribute.

(2:06) Tony – Didn’t they have Aunt Harriet around to avoid that kind of thing?

Dw. – Sure, but boys will be boys when you’re off tenting your Gielgud with foil.

(2:21) Tony – “What? No, I’m not interested in free dance lessons!” (How old a joke is that?)

Dw. – I won’t dance; don’t ask me.

(3:17) Tony – *spit take* Did he say “frontal lobotomy”? Well, thanks for that diagnosis, Dr. Grayson!

(3:33) Tony – No wonder the Joker will be able to get away with it. Huckleberry Hound’s watching the museum!

Dw. – Oh yes, “Guernica,” “Starry Night,” and “The Scream” are all in safe hands. Yes, this schlub’s hands!

(4:32) Tony – I guess they can’t say “dead” on a children’s record.

Dw. – He’s sleeping. Very soundly. I SAID, HE’S SLEEPING VERY, Oh, screw it. He’s dead.

(4:37) Tony – It never happens to the guys that have another ten or fifteen years before retirement, does it?

Dw. – That’s how they get out of paying pensions. They send Mike Bloomberg down with a shiv. (I’m NOT inferring that billionaire Mike Bloomberg kills people to keep from paying police pensions. Just that, y’know, it could work!)

(5:36) Tony – Yeah, excellent detective work, Mulligan. Especially since the Joker threw a rock through the window earlier that day.

Dw. – Be nice, Tony. Throw him a Mulligan. Hooh-haah!! T’ank yah, ladies and germs!

(5:58) Tony – Robin seems a little too preoccupied with “action.”

Dw. – He’s a growing boy hanging around a grown man in blue tights. Bound to happen.

(6:00) Tony – “In spades”? Nice one, Robin!

Dw. – Bruce Wayne is kind of like the guy who finds out that he had a teenage son from a random booty call fifteen years earlier, now he’s on his doorstep and, worse, he’s about as funny as a punctured condom.

(6:39) Tony – “Duh, I tripped on something!” Idiot.

Dw. – Excuses, excuses. You know damn well Robin’s getting drunk in the morning to hold his demons down. “Tripped…” Hah, he wishes!

(6:45) Tony  – Wow, I guess they can say “dead”. That’s the second corpse today. Man, the Joker doesn’t fool around. I remember back when he was perfectly content throwing rocks through the Commissioner’s window.

Dw. – And here’s where we have that similarity to the movies, because whatever The Joker’s using, it sure acts a lot like Smilex. Or he told them a funny joke and beat them to death with a rock. He loves rocks.

(7:01) Tony – Wait, so the Joker’s used this hideout before, and he was surprised that Batman remembered where it was? I don’t even think Cesar Romero would have made that goof.

(7:29) Tony – Apparently they’re exploding clubs.

Dw. – That’s why they issue liquor licenses. (What? Too soon?)

(7:55) Tony – Then why didn’t he just say “Holy Smoke!”?

Dw. – Where’s the Tea Party when you need ‘em? Someone should declare war on Holy Smoke.

(8:22) Tony – Arkham Asylum has a swimming team?

Dw. – An effective one too. They all take turns trying to drown each other. Last one alive is champion.

(9:11) Tony  – Well, sure. A super villain who’s already killed two men is completely helpless in three feet of mud. Go get ‘im, officers!

Dw. – Felled by grime! Curse you, Batman! You’ve summoned two of the elements against me!

(9:47) Tony – I thought I heard somebody singing “Clementine”!

(10:17) Tony – Of course it’s hot. It’s been stolen! (Rimshot)

Dw. – It’s so sad that, by comparison, the museum guy makes Mulligan look like a genius. Oh, Mulligan, you drunken Irish dunce, what would we do without you and your convenient stereotype?

(11:11) Tony – I don’t remember there being a Joker in the Game of Life. Just a cool spinner and those little cars that you couldn’t stick all your peg children into.

Dw. – Imagine the possibilities though. “Batman, you sank my battleship!” or, “Yahtzee, Caped Crusader!” or, “Why I’d love to play a round of Naked Twister with you and Robin.”

(11:58) Tony – Yeah, frontal lobotomies solve everything!

Dw. – Indeed! Frontal lobotomies for everyone! First brain-scramble’s on me!

Tony – What a fun story, but I was disappointed that we didn’t get any good jokes from the Joker though. No exploding jack-in-the-boxes or joy buzzers that actually shock people or anything like that. For an arch criminal, he didn’t do anything very arch, did he?

Dw. – No, but he did off a couple people with a powerful nerve toxin so, there’s that at least. Speaking of which, I just sliced off some Gielgud. We’ll see how it turned out.

(Chews. Grimaces.)

Yuck. A slab of Kasem probably would have been less salty.

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X-Men: First Class carried through on the promise (threat?) to go back to the franchise that was dulled severely by Brett Ratner’s third installment, and tarnished even more by a loud, brainless Wolverine spinoff. With original X-director Bryan Singer back on as an executive producer, the need to tell a good story beyond lots of flashy effects (of which there were many) was put at the forefront again where it belonged. What hurt the movie a bit, on two fronts, was that there was an overall brutality to it that was off-putting. Even some of the “good guys” came off like terrible people, deserving of the bigotry and shunning that is the crux of X-Men’s allegorical construction. It’s easy to forgive a good bad guy, but hard to forgive good guys that are jerks.

The other thing that held the movie back was that even though it was necessarily set in the early-1960’s, and the production design kept insisting it was so, the viewer never could truly feel the time period was correct. It felt like a post-Matrix movie, not post-James Bond like the EPKs kept insisting. These were things that kept coming to my mind even though I was enjoying the movie for what it was. It’s what they call the “Uncanny Valley” effect that the viewer knows what is a real person and what is a computer animation even if it is stunningly realized in CG. When the visual effects in First Class take over, it’s hard to go with the story being set in the handmade, sometimes clunky Sixties anymore. It looks like the times but feels far too new, go-go boots and mutton chops be damned.

Yet I will say that, of the comic book flicks of 2011, X-Men: First Class stands out above the equally anachronistic Captain America, the formulaic Thor, and the just-plain-awful-and-ugly Green Lantern. It’s a good movie that could have been better if, only once in a while, the makers would have forsaken the mouse for the practical effect.

So that brings us to Fox’s other preboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and of properties that could have been resurrected for new audiences, this is one that felt the most necessary, the most “right.” Leaving the property to the infinitely silly Tim Burton revamp seemed like such a waste of good assets, and so this story regarding the first of the sentient apes Caesar, played so well in a motion capture performance by the talented Andy Serkis, works on that fundamental story level. That story, of how a pharmaceutical organization embarks on a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease, uses lab animal simians as test subjects, and winds up playing god and setting the wheels in motion for their evolution, and man’s fall from grace, is smart and plays into the mythology novelist Pierre Boulle, original screenwriter Rod Serling, and director Franklin Schaffner conceived with the first Apes.

Had the filmmakers of today relied on such a strong foundation and rejected easy outs, my review would not now be heading into negative territory, but here we go. The script becomes so leaden with in-jokes and nods to the original story, those in the know can’t help but fall off the haycart to start looking for storyline easter eggs. Also, one of the “baddies” who is just more greedy and officious than pure evil, is Idris Elba who has a British accent. This convention, even though Elba is a very good actor, does some damage to the factor of suspension of disbelief. These can be glossed over when the character of Caesar takes the spotlight, but only to a point.

See, here’s the thing. Even though Serkis is giving his all for this part, and the interactions between him and the lead, played by James Franco, are alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking, I as the viewer could never get past the feeling I was watching a special effect. Forget the Blu-ray’s special features that tout the effects as revolutionary and spellbinding. They’re actually some of the worst effects I’ve seen in years.

The awfulness is that, one assumes, because the movie makers were shooting for that 3-D sweet spot, there’s a lot of separation between the digital apes and the live action actors. With the glasses, sure they may pop from the screen but even without, they are uncomfortably apart from the narrative. At times, the apes feel like Colorforms stuck to the TV screen, floating above the story world and never living in it.

Moreover, the designs of the apes range from indefinably simian but not sentient to weird, hairy children that have no monkey-like attributes otherwise. Seldom if ever does effects powerhouse WETA Workshop strike that middle path where you believe these creatures are a) actually a part of the movie, b) the next evolutionary phase inflicted by the ‘disease’ of a radically altered consciousness, or c) not just there to add 3-D jolts. Again, were it not for Serkis’ very heartfelt performance, there would be nothing to recommend these characters for.

And that’s pretty sad, really. The story is full of potential and hits it on a number of occasions. That the demise of humanity as dominant species was caused by the liberties they take on the natural world is a very Twilight Zone/Serling-esque P.O.V. and makes the conceptual aspirations of Rise of the Planet of the Apes perfectly aligned with the series it hopes to meld with. It was our species’ hubris that was our undoing, as well as a kneeling before some technological deity and not considering what such a pact entailed. The story gets that. The realization, however, misses it entirely and hits that digital effect chord way too hard and way too often.

Would the movie have been better with real apes? Well sure, but that defeats the point of the story of animal exploitation. What about putting people in ape suits? Yeah, but nobody would have taken it seriously; not by today’s audience standards. No, what was really necessary for both Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men: First Class was that they tried a little harder. Both movies were on the right track but both got caught up with what the digital Buddha could give them, and not remembering that you also have to work harder to earn it.

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In 1972, I would only have been three years old. My memories of that time would only have stuck around thanks to the re-enforcement of repetition and reminder.

My best friend is an atheist and he is a thoughtful, sensitive humanist. I have several close friends who are dyed-in-the-wool Christians and they conduct their lives without malice or bigotry. They believe in a supernatural presence and they deem him God. I also consider myself a Christian, believe in the validity of the Bible, but am not a literalist. I see the story of Jonah and the whale as those hearing Jesus’ parables would. They are legends with instructional purpose because we, as creatures of great intellect and free will, tend to be most receptive to stories. As you can imagine, either side has at times expressed great tolerance of my median viewpoints.

Richard Dawkins, the noted British biologist, is a highly intelligent man, capable of writing with both eloquence and elegance, and I have been fascinated by his work although there are large swaths of it that I don’t align with. Many of these are found in his book from 2006, The God Delusion. In the book he lays out point after point, argument by argument, why there is no deity, attempting to appeal to the marvelous core of human reason, and he succeeds…mostly.

When Dawkins rails against the hatred several religious types spew, verbal horrors vomited by so-called “Children of God” at the funeral sites of soldiers, or at the sidelines of parades, or a general intolerance to other viewpoints, he is correct and righteous in his disdain. I know of many people, in every religious persuasion, that are in equal agreement. Is it not the same broad brush he paints people of faith with, that is the brush those who claim to be of faith paint others?

In 1972, my aunt Florence Dunphy was lonely.

I cannot apologize for atrocities committed in the name of the Lord, but neither can I say that all that lean on the crutch of religion, faith or spirituality are cowards and deluded. I believe that the threat, and let me say that is exactly how I mean it: as a ‘wrath of God’ threat, is all that separates some in our society from being incredibly dangerous people. These are people who have been raised alongside the shallow pool of Narcissus, confident in themselves alone and, without the presence of something greater, would not be hesitant to tear through society to fulfill whatever it is their brain fixates on at that moment. They raise rhetoric that would otherwise have been a knife or a gun, and the haphazard randomness of the uncreated, unstructured natural world would be license to destroy. There are merely more amoeba in the puddle, they may assert, so they can disappear with no effect on society.

I do believe that for many, the loneliness of a world starving for father figures is eased by the spiritual equivalent, and that the teaching of Christ that “He who is without sin has the right to cast that first stone” was meant to erase our desire for holy one-ups-manship. We are all failed enterprises in the guise of mankind, and our myriad judgments must be taken against ourselves in kind to be truly considering ourselves ‘children of God.’ Love should conquer all, concern for all should be pre-eminent, and our prejudices should be swept aside because none of us are truly the hottest (expletive) in the outhouse.

In 1972, Florence Dunphy went to the local bar to find a man that would love her. She found a man.

I suspect that if Mr. Dawkins ever reads this, he would dismiss it as just one more tract of apologist nonsense. There are points in The God Delusion that are highly dismissive, to the point of being downright confrontational, and it’s a suit that fits Dawkins extremely poorly.  It sometimes reads like a shootout rather than a rational argument, with Dawkins standing atop a metaphorical mountain of bodies proclaiming, “Where’s your messiah now?” These moments are, however and blessedly, few. Although he approaches the subject with fervor, only occasionally does he become the zealot he so seemingly disdains. He’s trying to get mankind on board with the concept of the miracle of the natural world, that there is greatness in what simply is, and that a creator (real or invented) should not be imposed upon the greatness of what is.

But like I said earlier, sometimes that greatness in the human as the independent creature, freed from the shackles of an almighty overseer, is hard to find. I don’t remember my Aunt Flo. My memories of 1972 are fixed only because of the family that helped glue them in place afterward, the places we went to and went to again, the stories, all the post-it notes of shared history and “remember the time when we…” reminisces. On an early morning in 1972, my father was awoken by a phone. It was the Long Branch, NJ police. He was being summoned to the morgue to identify a body.

My aunt met a man who killed her, ditched her body in a dumpster like so much trash, then lit it on fire to destroy the evidence. I have often wondered if he believed in a god, or anything, while he was doing this. Did he not believe in a god and just saw others as the conduit or obstruction to his personal pleasures, just amoeba in a puddle, insignificant and expendable?

I am a sinner. I do my best not to be, and I do have a respect for the ‘wrath of God’ such as it might be, and part of my hope for a deity and the sin that bogs me down is because, whoever her killer was (and was never found), I hope he’s dead by now. I hope there’s a god, and I hope this person, for robbing me of her in my life, is burning in hell. Of my many transgressions, this one is never far from me.

It’s most difficult during the holidays with so many of my family members gone though, thankfully, not as violently as how Aunt Flo passed. I have no memory of her, yet I wonder what she would have been like if she lived. Would our families have been close? Would she be here Christmas Eve? Would she sing with my Dad? Would she and my mom, when she herself was alive, have been friends? If she finally found her knight in shining armor, would he have been a good man, and would I have been close with my presumptive cousins? If her heart had gone in another way, would her friend and I also been friends? I believe we would have, just as surely as I believe we were robbed from knowing.

And therein lies my biggest gripe with Dawkins’ book. God exists for people who love and don’t love, but mostly God exists because we need Him to. There are those who do not believe in a god do not need him to exist, and they are within their right to feel this way. I have no right to impose my belief on the author just as he has no right to denigrate me for mine. If we were right, we may yet meet Him. If we are wrong, and our brain kicks out and we decompose as all organic material is destined to, it won’t matter what we believed so long as it got us through life, forced us to consider if what we were doing was right or wrong, and perhaps taught us that we are born to love, not to hate…

…But that I got from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” a story for another day.

Related articles

• Dw Dunphy On…”Crying” (popdose.com)
• Dw. Dunphy On…Spockchant! (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Dw. Dunphy’s Best Of (And The Rest Of) (popdose.com)
• Richard Dawkins says David Cameron is ‘not really a Christian’. But is Dawkins a proper atheist? (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)

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