Like A Party That’s Over Before It’s Begun

I experienced entertainment saturation yesterday – I saw two films (Secretary and Bowling For Columbine), bought five comics, saw Sleater-Kinney and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and listened quite attentively to a lot of music while on the train. I’m still digesting it all right now, so I might put off writing about the movies for a bit, especially Bowling For Columbine.

The S-K/YYY show was okay, nothing too exciting. A girl named Mirah opened up, she did a pleasant but not particularly memorable solo set of diary-entry folk pop. She was amiable, had a nice voice, and played decent non-strummy guitar, but her songs all sounded the same. I don’t feel compelled to ever hear Mirah again, but I didn’t mind sitting through her set.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were a mixed bag – they played “Maps” and “Y-Control”, which made me very happy, but they didn’t play “Mystery Girl” or “Our Time”, which annoyed me. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that those are the two best songs off of their EP, what were they thinking? Sometimes I just don’t understand some bands. They did play “Art Star”, which is an extremely obnoxious novelty song, and a few of the new songs they played just aren’t very good. I already knew a few of them from their WMFU session – there’s no convincing me that “Machine” and “Tick” are good songs. They’re just not. I wish that they were more consistent, because when they are good, they’re very good. I can’t say I’m big on Karen O’s live shtick, by the way. It’s charming here and there, but she’s mostly just preening and mugging. It’s tiresome.

I wish I could’ve stayed through the whole Sleater-Kinney show, but I had to leave about halfway through to catch my train. They were playing a fairly surprising set, peforming one of my all-time favorites “Burn, Don’t Freeze” early on, which for me was enough to justify the price of admission. I was also quite happy to hear “Oh!” from One Beat, and a particularly good version of “Turn It On”. It seems I jinxed myself the other day, because all three songs I mentioned that I did not want to hear were played while I was there. It wasn’t that bad, but I can name about 30 Sleater-Kinney songs I would have rather heard. Oh – if you were at this show, and they happened to have played “Hot Rock” after I left, please don’t write and tell me, alright? Ignorance is blissful.

This is what they played up til I left – Far Away / Oh! / O2 / #1 Must Have / Burn, Don’t Freeze / One Beat / Turn It On / The Remainder / Youth Decay / Light Rail Coyote / You’re No Rock N’ Roll Fun

Only One More Non-Frank Issue To Go…

One of the comics I bought yesterday was New X-Men #133. Odd issue, I think. I can’t help but feel that this and the past few issues have been intentionally treading water til Frank Quitely comes back in December, biding time planting some important things that will become more significant later on. Some of it is just boring me, though – surely I’m not alone in finding the whole Fantomex/Weapon Plus thing not compelling in the least?

I’m getting very tired of seeing the bargain basement 90s reject characters trotted out as part of the X-Corporation, it seems like a blatant concession to the fanboy element, and they are little more than the X-equivalent of those guys in the red shirts on Star Trek. Wasn’t part of the idea behind pushing the franchise foward getting rid of all the dead weight characters? I feel sort of cheated, cos we haven’t seen most of the cast since May, with the exception of #131. I miss Henry and Xorn. I miss Scott and Emma. I am bored with Jean and Charles. Wolverine is even more boring – all of his scenes in this issue are typical Wolverine formula. Zzzzz.

I thought the whole Lilandra-tries-to-assassinate-Charles scene to be a bit much, and it just kind of came from nowhere. I know Grant wanted to shoehorn the Shi’ar into the issue for that last page, but surely it could’ve been handled a bit better than that. Since the letter column says next issue is the “prelude” to Riot At Xavier’s, maybe we can look foward to having the plot move foward a bit more next month. This is getting really tedious. I expect better from Grant Morrison.