While we're posting metal videos on our blogs...

Darian Worden's latest post at his blog inspired me to find an equally-fitting metal video to post here. Granted, not many things can equal performing with a viking ship on stage and billows of live flame shooting up whenever you growl the word "Fire!" But I think I found something fairly close.

In the late 1930's Sergei Prokofiev wrote the score for a Soviet war propaganda movie entitled "Alexander Nevsky", based on the historical and legendary figure of the same name. The music, and the movie it's written to accompany, can count as good examples of Socialist Realism - simple musical and literary themes, unambiguous moral virtues of the good guys and unambiuous evil of the bad guys, heroism of the crowd, cheap jabs at the rich, etc. - though this particular movie is probably more of a "let's kill Nazis" movie than a "nationalize the means of production" kind of movie. The villains are blond-haired German knights who wear scary helmets that have funny statuets on the tops of them, who lead thousands of faceless pawns, and who receive spiritual support and justification from pale, sunken-eyed black-hooded monks whose empathy for lost souls leads them to do the sign of the cross in front of each Rus child who is then thrown into the fire.

The Russian band Merlin made a death metal cover of one of the songs in the score, and very appropriately made a music video with footage from the 1938 movie.



I have but one criticism of the song - I wish they had included a choir. A choir would have made it WAY more epic. But I guess they didn't want something that sounds like they just added bass drums and guitar distortion to the orchestral and choral arrangement.

Another Email from My Friend - This Time About Child Sexuality

"My mom regularly gets books from the library, as she really likes to read. Today I saw she has a book called "Too Sexy, Too Soon", about the "sexualization of childhood" and "what we can do to protect our kids". As if kids who sexualize each other or adults either don't exist or are simply confused. She should read "Harmful To Minors" to balance it out (which I haven't in fact read myself, but definitely want to one of these days). In any case, I doubt I could ever have a mutually understanding conversation with her about childhood sexual feelings and their role in shaping how kids develop into adults. Not that I really would necessarily want to, anyway."

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"Actually, on further examination, the book is called "So Sexy, So Soon". And the rather odd thing of it is, I can agree with a lot of the messages in the book, at least as described on the inside front cover. Basically, the book is about commercialism and how children are born into a culture that tries to sell them values, so to speak. I can certainly agree that the images used in advertising and television present a narrow view of the world, and embody a passive mode of understanding that eschews critical thinking (and yes, I used the word "eschews" mostly just to sound cool). I can also agree with ideas like encouraging kids to play and invent their own imaginative, creative games, and express themselves more.

"The connection to sexuality, however, is where I get lost. It seems that not only does the book attempt to replace one form of repression and value-foisting with another, but it seems to relate two things that have little in common except being "fashionable" to worry about. If I wrote a book discussing the implications of school shootings that were supposedly shown by high obesity rates, people would shake their heads and wonder whether I really think that the students at Columbine turned to playing with guns because they didn't know how to exercise. Similarly, why is precocious sexual behavior now a symptom of commercialism? Do kids become curious about genitals after watching people experience wardrobe malfunctions while wearing the latest fad outfit?"

You know it's a good song when

lots of people cover it. You know it's a great song when lots of people sample it. This song (or rather, this chord progression) easily gets stuck in my head, and that's all right - it's the kind of tune you don't mind getting stuck in your head. Even though in high school my brother and I listened to a show named after the original song, I never heard this chord progression until the music video at the bottom came out. I was a freshman in college then. It was the first year I had a computer in my own bedroom. First year I stayed up all night with a person of the opposite gender. First year I tasted alcohol, first year I smoked anything, first year I seriously explored religions other than fundamentalist Christianity, and the first year I voted - and though I was a Republican among Republicans, I didn't vote for the Republican presidential candidate. For some reason.

International Read a Book Day

"We can actively work towards an open and informed society, or we can be complacent to paranoia and tribalism. I choose the former." -- Me

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