1994

1994, the year my life revolves around.

I think everyone would agree 1994 wasn't a bad year, we had the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, some lovely winter Olympic games in Norway, "Schindler's List" won 7 Oscars, Brazil won the world cup and O.J. Simpson got away with murder. Now these things are all great and wonderful but let's talk about the things that changed my life and made me the man I am today.

First off '94 was the year the greatest motion picture of all time was released..."Forrest Gump." If you ever want to witness a grown man weeping like a 7 year old orphan, watch "Forrest Gump" with me. When Forrest meets his son for the first time and when Forrest visits Jenny's grave, both scenes make me cry like a woman watching "Casablanca" or "The Wedding Planner" or whatever the hell makes women cry. Damn that Tom Hanks and his beautiful acting. Point is, that movie has deeply impacted me. It makes me feel good about life and myself and comforts me in the same way a grilled cheese sandwich prepared by my mother does.

Also in April of 1994 Kurt Cobain was found dead in a room above his garage at his home in Lake Washington, Seattle. At the time I was only 6 years old but even then I was still aware of how big of a deal that was. Granted at 6 I didn't fully understand just how tragic and detrimental this loss was to the world of music but as I have grown up few bands and few individuals have affected me as much as Nirvana and Kurt have. A couple months later MTV and Geffen records released Nirvana's 'Unplugged in New York' album which is one of my favorite albums of all time, if you have never heard it or seen the live performance on tv or dvd you are missing out.

Here is a little four minute taste...



Okay, let's continue.

Now, the movie "Jurassic Park" was actually released in '93 but I was not privileged enough to see it until the next year so I still count it as one of the wonders of 1994. If you were a kid who grew up in the 90s and you didn't love "Jurassic Park" I didn't want to be your friend. If you're an adult living in 2010 and you don't love "Jurassic Park" I still probably don't want to be your friend. Besides all the obvious fantastic things about JP; Jeff Goldblum, velociraptors, John Williams musical score, Jeff Goldblum, JP also released an absolutely amazing line of toys after the success of the film. I spent a good two years of my life sending Doctor Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm and a giant T-Rex on all sorts of crime fighting missions with Batman, the X-Men and what ever else assortment of odd ball toys I had acquired.

I could honestly keep going on and on. "The Shawshank Redemption", "Dumb and Dumber", and "The Lion King" all came out in '94, 2pac recorded the album 'Me Against the World', Beavis & Butthead and Ren & Stimpy ruled the television airwaves and Ben Affleck started on his journey to the top of the world. All of the things I just listed are very near and dear to my heart. The only thing that could have made this year any more epic and more vital to my existence would have been if Jordan and the Bulls could have won the championship for a fourth year in a row.

Music: A Confession

I am not ashamed to admit that my musical taste was initially formed by my father. I remember when I would ride with him from soccer practice, youth group, whenever...He would always have 107.1 THE FOX playing. It was here that I was introduced to such juggernauts as Led Zepplin, Deep Purple and AC/DC. It was also in these moments that I learned that KISS is a terrible band (Absolutely terrible, who legitimately likes this band?).

There was a time I wanted to have the exact same taste in music as my Dad. If he liked it, I did. If he hated it, as far as I was concerned it was crap.

It was a dark day in the Johnson home, the day I began to develop my own taste in music, especially when these tastes diverged. For example, Archie Johnson is not a fan of the Rolling Stones. He cannot stand Mick Jagger and not until college did I finally develop an appreciation for one of the single most significant rock bands of all time.

My dad started me on a road that has not ended yet. I have developed an appetite for music that is not easily satiated. This desire to seek out the classics as well as the underground sensations have introduced me to some gems. Some, like Bob Dylan took a bit longer than others. Some, I just cannot get on board with. Some of these bands I am ashamed to admit that when people talk about them or when they are played on the radio (does anyone listen to the radio anymore?) I quickly change the channel.

So, here is my confession. I have secretly kept to myself when people talk about certain key bands. Bands like The Cure or The Smiths. Or more modern versions like Vampire Weekend, Beach House or Yeasayer. This is not to say that these bands do not have a song or two that tickles my fancy, but I am just not interested in their wider catalogue.

When I love a band, truly love a band I seek after their music. I want to everything they've done. I scour the internet for interviews, b-sides and rarities so that I can have a holistic experience with the band. (I have almost 2 days worth of the Beatles for example)

This has been a extremely vulnerable time. I hope that this does not taint the good Matt Johnson name or the untouchable reputation of The Heretical Review.

(This blog does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of other contributors)

Below I have provided a short list of bands I really could care less about (Keep in mind all of these bands have at least a song or two I do like):

The Cure

Elvis Costello in any formation (This pains me. I've tried, I really have)

The Pretenders

Beach House

Vampire Weekend

Depeche Mode

The Smiths

Talking Heads

This is not an exhaustive list, I'm sure there are plenty of other bands I could do without. These are the ones that come to mind initially. Also, these aren't the bands I hate. That list would include KISS and early non-cheesy Aerosmith.

My heart is an open Nook

I recently started using my Nook. It is an amazing piece of technology. But it invites a question. It is really a sufficient substitute? Aesthetically, almost nothing beats a room with a bookcase, with rows and rows of beautiful spines shining out. Even if left unread, they're great looking furniture. But lets consider them as read. If you read a book, you have to have the right lighting, you have to be lucky enough to be aquainted with the right font, and the size of the font has to be just right to meet your eye's expectations. You also have to be armed with a bookmark because the last thing you want to do is dog-ear a page, unless it's a book you don't really care about. And even if you leave the book for a matter of minutes, there's always the slightly annoying interval where you're trying to find out exactly where you left off, and if you were off by just a little, you're stuck wading through a part you don't really pay attention to because you've already read it; you're just waiting to bump into the unfamiliar so that the pleasure of your reading can continue on unabated.

I find that the Nook takes care of all these inconveniences. I just remembered. A huge inconvenience with owning a mound of books is that if you move, they have to go with you, which means you have to start collecting boxes or buying plastic containers to store them in, and then you have all the labor that goes into loading them and unloading them, and then unloading the books themselves and reshelving them into some kind of order. Up to 2,500 volumes can be stored on a Nook, and it comes equipped with bookmarks. It is easy to navigate and you have access to and are able to buy newpapers and magazines too! But what is it about a book that makes it irreplacable? I have the convenience of having quick access to 'what is read'. But what is it that I miss about the real book? Do I miss the smell? Do I miss the feel of the pages in my fingers? Do I miss the fact that I love the little work it takes to make it through a book? Do I miss the fact that the book itself becomes a sort of friend, that you can personalize it, mark it, underline, make notes? But you can do this with a Nook.

Is it the digital medium that makes it less personal? But what's personal about physical pages compared to digital prose? I'm enjoying my Nook, but I feel like I'm missing something.

Devils tearing your life away: Jacob's Ladder

The demons in Jacob's Ladder look like the demonic paintings of William Blake. This is an original, terrifying movie. I picked it up by accident because the plot interested me. But I didn't know what I was in for. I was struck by the same feeling I had when I watched The Descent for the first time. It was a sleeper and barely made a blip on the radar in terms of gross. It's looks like it's the same with Jacob's Ladder.



Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam war veteran, a mentally unstable one at that. A bayonet pierces his side during the war, but his consciousness soldiered on in some unfamiliar mode. Has he died? We don't know for sure. Horned creatures begin to terrorize him. Interesting territory is explored. Just how is our consciousness going to adjust after death? Do we have any idea? Are we going to notice? Assuming we don't have a good clue because we're really old. How long will it take for our consciousness to catch up, to realize it's dead, assuming there is a hereafter, and if there is, there's a limbo, a no man's land, not quite Heaven, but not quite Hell. It's almost like the long, swift sucking sensation you get when you go down a steep water slide, or maybe the feeling you get when you just clear the edge of a gigantic waterfall: you're no longer on the river; but you're not where the waterfall meets the water down below.

That's sort of where Jocob might be. Little things begin to break through. He swears he sees a lizard-like tail squirm beneath a homeless man. Hideous faces that look like melting wax roam slowly just behind passing car windows. During a scene, Jacob's chiropractor quotes the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:

Eckhart saw Hell too; he said: 'the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.'

Jacob's Ladder is what Jacob is supposed to be on, the ladder being a meeting place between Heaven and Hell. But 'the Ladder' also has another meaning: it was an experimental drug given to American soldiers during Vietnam, and without their knowing. The drug made a short-cut to a person's urge for primal rage. It's a ladder leading down to that part of the psyche. New revelations about the drug shed light on the mystery of Jacob's alleged death!

All Hallow's Eve

'Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world." -William Shakespeare

What are some of the first things that come to mind when you think about Halloween? Go ahead, start shouting them out....jack o' lanterns, haunted houses, Vincent Price, razor blade apples, Michael Myers, hayrides, that one Olsen twins movie, dressing up like a ninja turtle, 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown', eating Reese's cups and pixie sticks until you go into a sugar induced coma....just a few things off the top of my head.
For most, Halloween is synonymous with candy and trick or treating, but for others Halloween goes hand in hand with evil spirits, and practices of the occult.

"This day anything goes, burning bodies hanging from poles. I remember Halloween." -Glenn Danzig

The thing that I don't understand about it, is why does everyone care so much about the so called "evil" aspects of the holiday? Sure certain things about Halloween have dark overtones...okay, a lot of things about Halloween have dark overtones but why does that prevent parents from letting their kids gather copious amounts of candy or attend harmless costume parties? Just to put it into prospective, Christmas, is all about the celebration of the birth of Christ but that doesn't stop non christian families from giving gifts to one another or putting a dead pine tree in their living room on December 25th. Why should Halloween be a different scenario, just because certain people or groups have taken their views on the holiday to an extreme?

"The first ten years of my life the only clear thought I ever had was 'get candy'. Family, friends, school, they're just obstacles in the way of candy. So the first time I heard the concept of Halloween my brain couldn't even process the information." -Jerry Seinfeld

The origin of what has become modern day Halloween stems from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain and the Catholic observation of All Saints' Day. The Celts believed that the hours between sunset on October 31st to sunset on November 1st was a time when the dead could return to earth. The Celtic people would dress up in costumes and light huge bonfires in an attempt to keep away the looming ghosts. While the Roman Catholics took this time of the year to celebrate and honor the lives of the saints, both known and unknown. Some how over the years the two holidays gradually mixed into one conglomeration. On the surface it might not seem like the two observances have very much in common but if you cut it down to the bare essentials, both celebrations are all about paying homage to the deceased and I guess that is how they eventually bled into one entity.

"Most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches, I do not buy candy during the Halloween season." -Pat Robertson

If you noticed in my brief little history lesson above there was no mention of casting spells or burning witches at the stake or carving swastikas into foreheads. These images and fantasies that we tend to think up in our minds and associate with Halloween have little to no actual relation, they are merely embellishments that have attached themselves over the years. In the same way a father might embellish or dramatize stories he tells his kids and then even further dramatize them for his grand kids. It is the same concept, what started out with bonfires and the warding off of unwanted dead relatives has gradually snow balled into a night of witches and goblins and demons and ax murderers. So in a way, Halloween is like a universal ghost story that keeps getting better with each passing year as the story continues to uncoil.

"Halloween is my kind of holiday. It's not like those other stupid holidays. I don't get pine needles in my paws. There's no dumb bunny, no fireworks, no relatives." -Garfield the Cat

Everyone likes to be scared and mischievous and let their imaginations get the best of them, so what's the big deal? Don't fall into the trap of thinking that Halloween is just a demonic birthday party for devil. It is a celebration of fall and a tradition I will always gladly participate in.

Lords of Salem

Musician/filmmaker Rob Zombie recently announced that he has begun work on his next full length film, to be entitled 'Lords of Salem'. Few details have been released about the script or the over all pre-production but Zombie did state that he will have "total control over the script, casting and final cut." Something that he didn't have while working on his big budget studio remakes of Halloween 1 and 2. For these reasons Zombie turned down the proposition to do a re-envisioning of Halloween 3 and a remake of the 1958 classic 'The Blob'.

Stating:
"The remake train is getting pretty tired now and when I made 'Halloween' everybody complained, either that it was too much like the original or too different. I like that people either love or hate what I do because it’s better than being in the middle, which means forgettable. But when you do an original premise, they take it on face value and after three years of not being able to win on 'Halloween', I just couldn't go through that again.”

I am assuming that this new project will take it back to the nitty gritty, to his 'House of 1000 Corpses' basics of innovative, low budget, film making. After the latest two pictures Rob released in 2009, 'Halloween 2' and 'The Haunted World of El Superbeasto' (an animated feature starring Paul Giamatti) both went relatively under the radar and became the scorn of many an angry Michael Myers fan and on-line bloggers, that apparently have nothing better to do then to bash the hard works of others in very humorous and obscene ways. I am guilty of both charges, for being a far too overzealous Myers fan and for wasting away a good portion of my life ridiculing and belittling others via the world wide web, the only difference is I happened to love 'Halloween 2'.

As I said above, little is known about the story line of the film so far, except that it is to take place in modern day Salem Massachusetts where inhabitants of the town come under attack by 300 year old demonic witches. If that doesn't spark your interest I don't know what will, it's like Rob Zombie's version of 'Hocus Pocus'! Hopefully Sarah Jessica Parker will play the hot witch in this one too. Filming is to begin in 2011, I'll keep you posted as I learn more.

Juliet, Naked: A Review

Today the Nobel Prize for Literature was given to Mario Vargas Llosa. He is the author of some plays and some other books, apparently. I was and still am unfamiliar with him. If my apathy towards this individual is not easily grasped in the virtual world than let me put it to you this way. I could easily wikipedia this guy, give you some facts and impress all of you. I am so uninterested in this guy that my vanity, my desire to impress you, the Heretical review reader is zilch, nada, nothing.

So instead, I thought I would list out some of the books I have read this year and tell you which ones I liked the best. I will also bestow the first ever HERETICAL REVIEW PRIZE FOR WORDS ON A PAGE.

This is exciting.

Here we go:

1. John Steinbeck- To a God Unknown

2. Kurt Vonnegut- Fates Worse than Death

3. Nick Hornby- Juliet, Naked

4. Raymond Carver- Cathedrals

5. Ernest Hemingway- The Sun Also Rises

And the winner is....

Ok, all of that was really a long way to get to a book I have been meaning to write about for a while. Nick Hornby has/is become one of my favorite modern writers. He is the author of the books High Fidelity, About a Boy and Fever Pitch. I'm pretty sure he taught me how to appreciate fiction and literature. This happened one day while sitting in Barnes and Noble when I casually picked up his A Long Way Down. I sat and read 200 pages in one sitting. It felt like minutes. But, it was really hours and I was late to pick up one of my siblings from soccer practice. That was the first time that had ever happened to me. The idea of getting lost in a good book was foreign to me. But, his wit and insight into humanity floored me. It was there, in that chair, that my love affair with the novel began.

From there I found myself gobbling up his novels. I read the books listed above inside of a month and found myself venturing out to other men and women writers. Something that attracts me to Hornby's writing is his male protagonists. They are incredibly likable but extremely flawed. I found myself in these characters, wondering how they were going to get themselves out of the situations they had created for themselves.

Juliet, Naked is nothing new in the canon of Nick Hornby. It is the story of a couple, Annie and Duncan. Both in the world of the Arts/Humanities. Duncan is obsessed with a singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. Crowe released a monumental album named, Juliet. After the release of this album he disappeared. Two decades later, a stripped down release of the same album is released called, Juliet, Naked. The story follows these three individuals as they end up in a bizarre triangle (which conveniently enough is my favorite shape).

This book for any music fan, is immediately accessible. We can all relate with becoming overly obsessed with an album artist or some piece of art. We desire to have everything they have ever done, we spend hours discussing the meanings to some mysterious lyrics. In this modern world, we follow their blog, twitter and ask to be their friends on facebook. We assume that this musician, novelist or artist in general would love us if they met us.

I mean why wouldn't they? We are interesting, with things plenty of things to say!

This book explores themes of love, future, family, career, trust, concern and a myriad of other things. Also, it is absolutely hilarious. I recommend that you pick it up and read the first chapter, if you are not laughing by the end of the chapter, than maybe you should go and read this weeks issue of Tiger Beat.

If summer had not already passed us by I would call this a "Perfect Summer Sun Book" but since it is fall I will call it, "Perfect Cuddle/Fireplace Book".

Do yourself a favor, take a break from those school books, daily routine, and that mediocre relationship and crack open this book. You won't regret it.