Current Ramblings
Monday, February 23, 2004
It's late. I'm tired. I should really go to bed. I'm not going to.
I finally finished watching the entirety of Chobits, which is an impressive feat for me. I just never sit down and watch DVDs, which is sad, since I have so many of them. You might say to me, "Jenni (or Trix), I didn't realize you liked Chobits." And I would say to you, "It's an anime/manga series about an adorable, naive computer's search for her true love. How could I not like it?" And then you would remember that I'm some kind of weird freak and you'd back away slowly. I have to say I liked the ending to the anime a bit more than the manga, simply because it made a little more sense. It seems almost like the anime was how they would have ended it if they had had time to think it through a little better. The manga was all, "Chi is a chobit, but 'chobits' was just the cutesy nickname we gave Elda and Freya and they aren't actually special, that was an internet rumor," and while it seemed a logical extension that Chi's "special program" was to give all other persocoms the ability to love, it didn't seem to actually happen. In the anime there wasn't any of that, "Oh, they aren't special, never mind," and it was clearly implied that Chi's special program did actually allow them to love. Well, Dita blushed.
Only Windy will understand any of the preceeding paragraph.
I keep wanting to write an essay on the possible emerging character of the first decade of the century, but it always digresses in my mind into an argument on how vastly, incomprehensibly more artistic an approach to the subject of paternal abandonment Pearl Jam's "Daughter" is to anything Linkin Park or Staind have had to say on the matter. I blame this on Walky, who loves to accuse me of nostalgia blindness in comparing to 90s grunge and current hard rock while he himself has heard extremely little of either. I will also, just for the moment, cite the aggressive, blatant, and disgusting mysogyny in current hard rock that's a massive departure from the deep respect the grunge scene in general had for women. Garbage can do a song called "Stupid Girl". Cold cannot. It's like how you can only get away with using "nigga" in a song if you're actually of African-American descent. The "angsty" music of the 90s had a much darker, dirgier, harsher sound that anything we were used to, with poetic lyrical metaphors. Current "angsty" music is just fucking whiney, with lyrics that read like a shunned middle schooler's LiveJournal.
I think the real cultural impact of this decade is technology. While things like the internet and the cell phone and digital recording media have been around for a decade or two, we're seeing a level of accessable high technology that is leading to the age of the connected consumer. We are becoming more like the Japanese not just in our choice of animation, but in our embracing of new gadgets and devices. Just like in the 1950s, consumer-level technology is taking such dramatic leaps that it is changing our lives before our eyes. But at the same time, corporations are taking over more and more. The concept of corporate radio was unheard of until the last few years. Lionel Richie recently said that something like "We Are the World" couldn't be accomplished now because, by the time all the test groups and marketing hurdles were successfully jumped, the problem would no longer be relevant. Maybe later I'll have more thoughts on the emerging decade.
And maybe I'll sleep. After Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
posted@2:52 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments