Things That Are Terrible

This is slightly off topic, but I have to get these Things that are Terrible off my chest. You know, before the metaphorical immune system protecting my aesthetic sensibilities creates so much bile that my brain swells and/or pops, leaving me helpless in the face of the onslaught of painful procedural dramas (what happens when NCIS goes bad), reality television, and killer tomatoes.

Subjects today: "Underdog" by Spoon and "The Ruins" by Scott Smith.

Underdog - This song sounds like an amalgam of every overplayed classic rock song you've ever heard, and if you're around my age and grew up near a radio you've probably heard a lot of them--tired horn phrase, some hard-strumming guitar, and plaintive, upbeat male vocals singing about gettin' there, workin' hard, and what you have to do to survive. I am not against any of these things, I simply can not be expected to appreciate a song which is characterized by the uninspired re-mashing of said concepts to produce lethargic, repetitious, and grating sound poison. I only wish my neural networks could function faster, in order to send my fingers more speedily to the SEEK dial when I hear the opening tones of this terrible tune.

To it's credit, the lyrics (I listened to them once, while using the song as an exercise in mind-body centering to counter the rage impulse) are censuring small-mindedness and the inability to allow endeavors other than one's own any kind of significance. That is the only thing about this song I can put after the conditional phrase "To it's credit..." I listened to some other Spoon tracks, and my first impression was relative indifference, so maybe the rest of the album could be ok.

The Ruins - My contempt for this piece of printed media is not so strong as the aforelisted item. The writing does not suck, and he does a good job with some character exposition, albeit along grossly stereotyped lines. But, hey. This is a horror novel, aware of its pulpiness (which spares it from full derision) so, ok. But there is no excuse for the gross, really offensive--really, you just have to take my word for it because I could never in good conscience suggest that you read the book to find out for yourself--overuse of the word "implacable" and its many derivates.

The suspense was supsenseful for a while, but 1/3 of the way through the book I was reading every other paragraph of expo. I cannot fathom making it through this book without skimming. When shit started to go down things were appropriately gruesome, but then shit kept going down, implacably, and things remained gruesome. I couldn't wait for all of the characters to die and I only finished because I was on a bus, which was implacably moving forward. Ok, ok, I'll admit to curiosity as to whether or not there would be any survivors (there weren't), and whether or not the villain (an intelligent man-eating vine organism) would be explained (it wasn't). The book was implacable in attaining its haunting ending, implacably implacating the implacableness, implacable.

While I'm on terrible, Prey by Michael Crichton. I don't remember why, but boy, that was bad.

Alright, allow me some time to recover from the hate spitting and we'll get productive next time around.