RECIDIVISM

Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges is asking his readers which band or bands they've seen the most often. For me, the leaders are Iron Maiden, Einstürzende Neubauten and Cecil Taylor in a three-way tie. I've seen each four times, with my fifth Maiden concert coming up on 7/12.

Right behind them are the groups or artists I've seen three times each: Amon Amarth, Arch Enemy, Borbetomagus, Clutch, Fishbone, the Flying Luttenbachers, High On Fire, Isis, Machine Head, Motörhead, the Rollins Band, Slayer, Slipknot and Social Distortion.

Then there are those I've (only) seen twice: AC/DC, Black Sabbath (once with Ozzy, once with Dio), Butthole Surfers, Ornette Coleman, Dio (as a solo act), Exodus, Ice-T, Jane's Addiction, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Orthrelm, Pantera, Iggy Pop (once solo, once with the Stooges), Radiohead, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Sword, and Rob Zombie.

I'm probably forgetting some, too—bands I saw open for several different headliners, or other unmemorable circumstances. If you're reading this, are you a recidivist? Do you see the same bands over and over? Are you always happy you went?

ENGLISHMEN AND OTHER MUTANTS

The British gangster movie 44 Inch Chest seemed promising when I spotted it on Netflix. A movie starring Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt and Joanne Whalley about a gangster who kidnaps his wife's lover? I was sold. But the movie I actually saw felt like a cruel trick.

(I probably should have done just a few seconds' more research. I didn't find out until after I'd sat through the thing that it was written by the same two men who'd previously given the world Sexy Beast, which I also hated.)

Winstone's wife (Whalley) cheats on him with a younger man. So he beats the man's name out of her and he and his gang—though it should be made clear their criminality is merely implied; no illegal activities other than some violence take place on-screen—drag the hapless boytoy off to a hidden location...whereupon they start yelling at him. And each other. A lot. For the next hour and a half, more or less.

Do you like watching middle-aged Englishmen shout adolescent obscenities at each other? Does the idea of watching Ian McShane mince around while John Hurt screeches hoarsely about how much he loathes gays sound like your kind of evening? Have you wished there was some kind of cinematic diorama that would illustrate the varieties of English masculine sexual dysfunction for you, in the most unsubtle and caricatured manner possible? Then by all means check out 44 Inch Chest. Me, I'm not such a big fan of old men shouting "cunt" at each other at the top of their lungs.

What I am a fan of is Timothy Olyphant. Justified was easily the best new show of this past TV season, and though I never watched Deadwood (didn't have HBO at the time), I've enjoyed his work in a whole bunch of movies: The Girl Next Door, Go, A Perfect Getaway, Meet Bill, even total crap like Hitman and Live Free Or Die Hard.

The Crazies isn't crap. In fact, it's better than the 1973 George Romero original. That one had a good idea—small-town America afflicted with a biohazard that drives the neighbors to homicidal rage—and that's what the remakers kept. They changed a lot more, mostly by paring stuff away. The military perspective, which was present in the first version, has been almost totally excised. All you get is one soldier telling our heroes (and us) that he knows nothing, and a (presumably, since he's driving a black SUV and isn't wearing camo) higher-ranking dude explaining what the pollutant in the town's water supply is, exactly. But that information only comes after people have already been rounded up and divided into the infected and the clean.

Olyphant plays the local sheriff; Radha Mitchell, who also does excellent work in genre movies (Pitch Black, Man On Fire), is his wife. The rest of the cast is basically anonymous (the exposition delivery system in the black SUV is played by Glenn Morshower, a Hey, It's That Guy! of the highest order) but they play frightened Iowans well. The violence is plentiful, but not splattery, and while it doesn't end as well as the Dawn of the Dead remake did, it has a similar fatalism. (Actually, it probably owes more to Return of the Living Dead than anything.)

HOW TO GIVE YOURSELF A STROKE

The new issue of Alternative Press is out, and I contributed more to it than I have to any issue in several years. The editors decided to do capsule write-ups on every single band playing Warped Tour 2010, and I wrote (and sometimes rewrote) 15 of 'em in the course of something like ten days; I blurbed After Midnight Project, American Sixgun, Artist Vs Poet, Brass Tackz, Emmure, Every Time I Die, Eyes Set To Kill, I See Stars, Iwrestledabearonce, The Jukebox Romantics, The Mighty Regis, Parkway Drive, Pierce The Veil, Suicide Silence, and Terrible Things. I've also got reviews of the new albums by A Plea For Purging and The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, and a review of the new In This Moment disc that's accompanied by an interview with vocalist Maria Brink. It was a busy couple of weeks, but when the check arrives, it'll all have been worth it.

I LOVE THE '80s

Last week, I spotted a story on io9.com that Barnes & Noble was having a blowout online sale on trade paperback comic anthologies. So I clicked over, and sure enough, there were a whole bunch of titles that had been reduced to $2.99. Most were of no interest to me, but I spotted three that I decided I wouldn't mind revisiting. The lesson for publishers? Put out a comic—I'll ignore it. Anthologize it. Wait 5-10 years. Drop the price by 80 percent or so, and you might get my attention. Yes, I am your Ideal Consumer, am I not?

Actually, that's not totally fair, because I did wind up purchasing one book at more or less full price, in addition to the three I got ultra-cheap. My total haul: the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller Wolverine limited series paperback and the two volumes of The Trouble With Girls, at $2.99 each, and Miller's Ronin for $16.99 or something like that.

Ronin, for you youngsters, was a six-issue series Miller did immediately after leaving Marvel Comics for DC in the mid '80s. It was about a Japanese samurai who'd been battling a demon in his own time, but who was cast into a dystopian future through black magic before he could finish the job. In post-apocalypse (or maybe "brink-of-apocalypse" is more accurate) New York, he fights sewer mutants, ultra-baroque street gangs, and the demon he was chasing all along. There's much more to it, including corporate intrigue and a bunch of is-this-real? hoo-ha, but samurai vs. demon is the core of it.

You may notice that this is pretty much the exact same plot as the unbelievably awesome Cartoon Network series Samurai Jack. That's not a coincidence; SJ creator Genndy Tartakovsky has acknowledged lifting the core concept. (He also based an episode of SJ on 300, long before that comic became a movie.)

The first couple of issues of Ronin (and individual pages in the later ones) contain some of Miller's best artwork. There's real beauty on every page, not just in the way the characters are designed but the way the panels fit together and the way the action moves from panel to panel. It's tremendous stuff, much more impressive (to me) than, say, Watchmen, another series lauded for its art.

The Trouble With Girls is a whole other matter. These two paperback volumes contain the first 14 issues, which ran between 1988 and 1989, all based on a simple but funny idea—our hero, Lester Girls, is a secret agent who's neck-deep in beautiful women, crazed assassination attempts by enemies from every nation, and awesome adventures on land, sea and in the air, but all he really wants out of life is a quiet suburban home, a boring day job, and to finish reading John Steinbeck's The Red Pony. He reluctantly sulks his way through a string of mind-blowing exploits with his trusty sidekick, Apache Dick, all the while longing for a Ward Cleaver-esque existence he can never have.

It's written by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, two dudes who worked for National Lampoon in the early to mid '80s, and tonally it's not unlike something you might have seen in the back of that mag in those days, ripping on early- to mid-century manly-man pulp fiction and "men's adventure" novels of the Remo Williams/Mack Bolan style, including a fair amount of pretty raw ethnic humor and a shit-ton of sexism, not all of it satirical. I don't think it's as funny now as I did when I was fifteen, but it made me laugh more than a few times, so it was worth the six bucks.

The last thing I bought, a paperback containing the 1982 Wolverine four-issue mini-series and two related issues of X-Men (the latter two with art by someone other than Frank Miller), was a purchase based on pure nostalgia. I've never really liked comics about people with super-powers. I like Batman okay, because he's got nothing really going for him but untold billions of dollars and bottomless, obsessive rage. I liked Green Arrow (particularly Seventies "socially conscious" Green Arrow) for the same reason. And Wolverine, while he's clearly got super-powers (metal bones, healing abilities, animal senses), is in this mini-series at least more of a secret agent/commando than a costumed hero. He only wears his X-Men costume once, in the first issue of the mini-series; after that he's wearing jeans and boots, getting drunk and starting fights. Of course it's overwritten in boneheaded ways; every issue has to start with "I'm Wolverine. I've got these metal claws in my hands, and metal bones too, and I heal real fast," just in case it's someone, somewhere's first-ever Wolverine comic, or they were struck on the head by a brick between the last issue they purchased and this one. And the version of Japanese society portrayed in the comic is kinda ludicrous, too, of course. But the fights are very well-drawn, and the plot makes a reasonable amount of sense, so it's a fun, quick read. Which is all I wanted it to be.

AMG UPDATE

Another two weeks, another nine reviews for All Music Guide:

Foghat, Last Train Home
Kruger, For Death, Glory, and the End of the World
Noctiferia, Death Culture
Parkway Drive, Deep Blue
The Ruins of Beverast, Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite
Sabbath Assembly, Restored to One
Witchery, Witchkrieg
Yakuza, Of Seismic Consequence
Dweezil Zappa, Return of the Son of...

Also, one that I submitted, but which didn't run:

JUAN GABRIEL
Juan Gabriel
Fonovisa
Juan Gabriel’s 2010 album, his first since 2003’s Inocente de Ti, couldn’t be more different from that record. Where Inocente was an attempt to modernize his classically gooey pop-balladeer style with alt-rock guitars and radio-ready pop songwriting, Juan Gabriel (as its cover art, with Gabriel perching a sombrero on the back of his head like he’s afraid it’ll muss his hair, should indicate) is a shockingly traditional album almost entirely composed of mariachi songs—trumpets and surging strings are all over this thing. There are some weird touches, of course; on “Por Que Me Haces Llorar?” the string arrangements are more Roy Orbison than Vicente Fernández, and the echo effect on Gabriel’s voice at the end of each chorus is distracting in a sort of awesome way. There’s even a song called “Mariachi,” and it’s as over-the-top as everything else here. Gabriel never sleepwalks through a song—he sells every note, which is exactly what a sobbingly dramatic style like mariachi demands. This is a terrific record slathered in Juan Gabriel’s trademark passion and vocal mastery.