Salmon Shoes

I just came across this very-minor-curiosity news story:

Macklemore Debuts New, Personalized Air Jordans, And They're Panned By Fans

This is Macklemore the rapper, he of the duo with Ryan Lewis and the "Thrift Shop" song. Truth be told, I've never listened to it and have no particular plans to. However, this thing with the shoe does interest me.

Basically, Macklemore presented a Jordan Brand shoe with custom coloring inspired by salmon, dubbed the "Northwest King Salmon Melo," which I assume relates to the fact that he is from Seattle (the "Melo" denotes the basic shoe platform being the Carmelo Anthony signature model). That's all cool, in theory at least. But here is what the shoe actually looks like:

Source: Instagram

Now, the first thing that one notices about this shoe is how monotone it is. Custom color notwithstanding, it would seem that the key to personalizing footwear would be to include more chromatic variation than that.

Twitter user @lankdan calls the shoe out for looking like "uncooked fish," which is true. But I grew up in Alaska, and I've seen many salmon, and the shoe looks just as much like cooked fish as uncooked fish. The real point is that they look like the inside of a fish. Where is the silver, the scale patterns?

It is actually a fantastic idea to take visual inspiration from salmon, but at least half of the equation has to be the skin of the fish. Even when "reddening" in spawning mode, a king (chinook) salmon is primarily defined by its silvery outer color, like so:

Source: Wikipedia

Combining a silvery scale pattern with the characteristic "salmon pink" internal color is a great potential design scheme. Basketball shoes, already prone to just-as-gaudy motifs, often incorporating shiny patent leather (not to mention herringbone out-sole traction patterns), would be a perfect fit.

Long story short, this shoe is a missed opportunity.

However, it does bear mentioning that actual salmon skin, or "salmon leather" as it is often called, is a real thing in the world of clothing, albeit on more of a trendy specialty basis at this point.

Even just in the realm of whimsical art, here is an example of how much fun salmon, specifically the outside of them, can be:

"Canned Salmon" by Chris Arend
(Anchorage - Wild Salmon on Parade)

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Ranking Marvel Comics Films

Having recently enjoyed Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I felt like revisiting and updating my personal rankings of the Marvel Comics-based films that have been released so far. While The Winter Soldier is, in my opinion, the best film yet produced in-house by Marvel Studios, I cannot quite rank it as the top film in this list alongside films produced by Sony and Fox.

There are several Marvel-based films that I have not yet seen - the Blade, Punisher and Ghost Rider franchises as respective wholes, Elektra, Howard the Duck, the 1990 Captain America film, etc.

Anyway, here is how I rank what I have seen:

1.  X2: X-Men United  -  The most thematically powerful, comprehensively well-made Marvel film.

Highlight  -  The 'coming out mutant' scene at Bobby Drake (Iceman)'s parents house.

2.  Spider-Man 2  -  No other Marvel movie has more heart. From an emotional standpoint, this is an incredible film.

Highlight  -  The Train Sequence

3.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier  -  Mature tone, spy-genre sensibility and a great ensemble cast playing out a resonant story.

Highlights  -  Robert Redford as Alexander Pierce. The breathtaking design of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s headquarters, the Triskelion.

4.  Spider-Man  -  A remarkably pitch-perfect comic book film, translating the aesthetic and fun straight off of the page and onto the screen.

Highlight  -  J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson, a comic book character brought brilliantly to life if ever there was one.

5.  Hulk  -  Under appreciated and a bit on the weird side, but few superhero films have ever been so thoughtful and ambitious.

Highlights  -  The incredible combination of sets, cinematography and editing. The psychological depth of the story.

6.  Iron Man  -  Tight, concise and surging with charisma. This was a masterstroke for Marvel Studios.

Highlight  -  Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark.

7.  X-Men: First Class  -  A great spread of back-story and foundation, wrapped in fab 1960's historical fiction.

Highlights  -  The set and costume design. Arguably the best climactic set-piece of any film on this list.

8.  X-Men  -  A strong, character-driven foundation for modern, serious comic book films.

Highlights  -  Phenomenal, diverse casting. The Wolverine-Rogue subplot.

9.  Thor  -  The perfect approach to this character, techno-Vikings and science geeks, given Shakespearean flair by the perfect director, Kenneth Branagh.

Highlights  -  Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston as Thor and Loki, respectively. The gorgeous visual design of Asgard.

10. The Wolverine  -  Dark, stripped-down and visceral. If it weren't for the inconsistent ending, this would be ranked much higher. (I still have not seen the Unleashed Extended Edition, which is reputedly a better version.)

Highlight  -  Rila Fukushima as Yukio.

11.  Iron Man 3  -  A very satisfying end to its trilogy, with a great mix of pathos, action and humor. The 'Mandarin twist' is divisive, but I loved it. How often do you get a true surprise in one of these films?

Highlight  -  The Air Force One Rescue Sequence

12.  Captain America: The First Avenger  -  Lovingly constructed and wonderfully earnest, although it plays as a bit of a montage. Marvel Studios crammed quite a bit into this film.

Highlights  -  Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell as Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter, respectively, both separately and together.

13.  The Avengers  -  No other film is as much fun, or quite the same team-building landmark. Still, the plot and climactic villains (the Chitauri) both strike me as sub-par. This is an instance of sheer charisma covering the weaknesses. But there are weaknesses.

Highlight  -  The witty, endlessly entertaining banter between the characters.

14.  The Incredible Hulk  -  A solid take on the character, but in over-correcting for Hulk's weirdness, this film limited itself to the relatively mundane.

Highlight  -  Edward Norton in the lead role.

15.  Spider-Man 3  -  Overstuffed with villains and plot lines, and not a little bit crazy, but satisfying and spiritually consistent nonetheless.

Highlights  -  Thomas Hayden Church as Flint Marco/Sandman. Also, the emo Peter Parker dance sequence, because sometimes there's nothing better than taking a step into the bizarre.

16.  Iron Man 2  -  Disjointed as an overall film, but enjoyable in spite of its unevenness.

Highlight  -  The Howard Stark/World's Fair/New Element plot device, a very inspiring conception, even if a bit clumsy in execution.

17.  X-Men: The Last Stand  -  A decent film in its own right, but a drastic drop in quality and change in tone from the first two X-Men films.

Highlights  -  Ummm...I suppose, the final teaser scene with Magneto. Otherwise, there just is not a lot to choose from here.

18.  Daredevil (Director’s Cut)  -  An odd combination of gritty and downright whimsical. The net result is, to me, somewhat less than compelling.

Highlights  -  The small pleasures, such as the design of Matt Murdock's apartment and Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Grey herself) as legal secretary Karen Page.

19.  Fantastic Four  -  Fun, lively and easy-viewing family entertainment. Also campy, unfortunately, and a decidedly underachieving representation of the source material.

Highlights  -  Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis are superbly cast as Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm, respectively. A pity that the rest of the cast is not so pitch-perfect.

20.  Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer  -  A reasonably thoughtful, dynamic sequel. Same basic issues as its predecessor, though.

Highlights  -  Laurence Fishburne as the voice of the Silver Surfer. Also, I'm going to break with the common consensus and say that the "space cloud" depiction of Galactus was a good idea and makes sense.

21.  The Amazing Spider-Man  -  Fantastic first twenty minutes. This should have been incredible - just look at that killer cool poster art. But the producers neglected the story, and that is the cardinal sin.

Over the course of two hours, this film devolves from a promising reboot into an unrealized, lesser imitation of Spider-Man 1 and 2. A pity.

Highlight  -  The outstanding cast.

22.  Thor: The Dark World  -  A stakes-raising sequel with no true drama and an almost complete absence of substantive character development. Nothing about this film is egregiously bad, but it's difficult to find anything especially good, either.

Highlight  -  The eye contact shared between Jane Foster and Sif as they walk past each other in Asgard. Unfortunately, this dynamic is given mere seconds of onscreen insinuation. There is romantic drama (with a potentially fascinating love triangle) waiting in the wings, but it goes mostly unexplored.

23.  X-Men Origins: Wolverine  -  A disjointed feature-length montage full of ludicrous, over-the-top action sequences and disappointing character portrayals.

Highlight  -  The sparse, beautiful Canada sequence with Lynn Collins as Kayla Silverfox. That part of the film should have been the template for its entirely, and indeed looks forward to the more intimate tone of the vastly superior The Wolverine.

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Zepparella "When the Levee Breaks" Video

So, this is not new, but I just came across it today. It's a cover of Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" by Zepparella. I know that there are plenty of Zep cover bands out there, and this is not the only all-female one, but this might be the most that I have ever enjoyed seeing one of them perform:

Sure, other bands might be a lot wilder, with mismatched outfits and under-some-influence antics. But I like this take very much. It has a sleekness to it that keeps locked dead-on to the pulse of the song. The lead vocalist knows exactly what she's doing, and you can hear every instrument. Very cool.


While I'm at it, though, the other Zep cover performance that I really enjoyed (and I'll be honest, I haven't seen that many) was on American Idol a few years back. No, it wasn't Adam Lambert. It was Elise Testone, doing "Whole Lotta Love."

Like this:

Someone made a comment at the time, and I completely agreed, that Elise could be Robert Plant's niece. She absolutely sings the heck out of this song, up one side and down the other. The raspy vocals, the unusual runs and the best crazy-yet-listenable scream that I've ever heard anyone pull off. This song is about attitude as much as anything else, and she nails it.

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Poem "Albatross"

"albatross"

the dark side of taking risks / is the complication of your existence

there's nothing unprecedented about this

the dark skies above us / are only a side effect

of staring into shadows / with our eyes closed / in apprehension

i was going to say / that it’s not as simple as it seems

but maybe it’s a lethal dose of simplicity / inescapability

you may be able to free me from my guilt

but i cannot get by myself

i’ve come to understand that this is just the way it is

there are no options / d’y2 think that i have a choice here?

white lining around the borders of the clouds

the quiet draws out the sadness

my white whale / is poles apart / from my holy grail

and so the quiet draws out the albatross

the cover of the north / is four corners of a clean-pressed shirt

the melancholy / in your maturity

the sounds of a sad, soul album / recorded ten years after the fact

it’s the motion capture of your slow collapse

it’s the sound of snowflakes being born

in the origin of the path of capricorn

in a river of silver / i am born again

that’s just the way it is / it’s your existence / just live with it

white lining around the borders of the clouds

the quiet draws out the sadness

my white whale / is poles apart / from my holy grail

and so the quiet draws out the albatross

the stillness fills the space with empty brackets

there’s no motion for the camera to capture

the anchor holds the present just below the surface

hits the pause on the play for the purpose

the weight bends my wings down to the earth

there is no escape from this rotational curve

waving goodbye to myself in the mirror

when i know that i’ll always find myself right there

the stillness summons the albatross

in a river of silver / i am born again

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some burdens just persist

Apple Cinnamon Cheerios...

...are really good.

I was not paid to say that.

Kurt Cobain Post

It may be cliched to write something about Kurt Cobain. However, as the first week of this April marks twenty years since his death, I feel like saying something. It's a complicated subject that has been written about extensively, but an important piece of our cultural identity. And it does mean something to me as an individual.

In 2012, I was in Seattle and visited the EMP Museum, catching the exhibit Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses. Later that year, while driving through Portland, OR in a rental car, the song "Lithium" started playing on the radio. It seemed very appropriate. And of course, this past year has been awash in 90's nostalgia of the most acute kind. It's all gotten me to revisiting the framework of my existence in the context of the era...

I was just a little too young to be on board for the first "Grunge" wave of the early 90's. I started getting into music in the latter half of the decade, and only really became acquainted with Seattle bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Nirvana by reading about them and then reaching backwards in time. By the time I graduated from high school, I owned three Pearl Jam albums and Soundgarden's Superunknown. But to this day, I have never owned a Nirvana album.

One of my friends in high school, not coincidentally the one who sold me my favorite electric guitar, was very much a Nirvana fan. He let me borrow Nevermind and MTV Unplugged in New York, both of which I listened to. He also had a t-shirt with a picture of Kurt Cobain performing with angelic wings behind him, similar to this:

At the time, I found the image inappropriate, or at least conceptually dissonant. Perhaps because I was going through a very religious phase in my own life and trying to be very focused on things positive, I did not see the validity in portraying a rock star, and one who had allegedly killed him self, in that light.

More broadly, I didn't relate strongly to the music of Nirvana at that point in my life. I could appreciate the technical quality and energy of their recordings and performances. But thematically, I found Kurt's songs to be angry and negative. And so many of them are. In fact, the whole Nirvana experience is tinged with something less than uplift, if you look at it from a distance. Why does it, and did it, appeal to people?

The short answer is, in a word: catharsis. It taps into something identifiable and real and calls it for what it is, and more than that is a bridge to release tension. I remember reading a comment somewhere online, a couple of years ago, in which the commentor basically said, "When I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' it was the first time that I recall ever feeling like a song connected to me and my actual life and what I was going through." It's a safe bet that that person, like most of us, couldn't make out most of the exact lyrics at first, but the power of the track is such that it really doesn't matter.

For whatever it's worth, the lyrics are more intelligible in Tori Amos' evocative cover of the song:

Anyway, fast forwarding slightly through the space time continuum, if it's not too ridiculous a thing to say, I've come to a place where I "get it." (Generally speaking with regard to Kurt Cobain/Nirvana.) The last few years of my existence have not been the easiest, to say the least. It helps to encounter something that makes you feel like you're not alone. That doesn't mean embracing the downward spiral, but feeling empowered to talk about it, to share your feelings. To be real about things.

Kurt Cobain was clearly an unhappy person, suffering on multiple levels and as the saying goes, fighting plenty of his own demons. And it seems that he lost that fight. He's not a role model; it's dangerous to put celebrities on pedestals, especially those who take their own lives, as the gears of the fame machine perversely are wont to do.

But at the same time, it's shortsighted to disregard the positives that can be derived from the experience. It's beyond cliche, having been evoked ad nauseam, to point out that Nirvana is arguably the last American rock band to have made a truly singular, lasting impact on the cultural consciousness. That's the sort of thing that nostalgists and list-makers (of which I am admittedly one) tend to bring up again and again.

More important, though, is that Nirvana helped -- along with many of their peers -- to restore faith in the ability of rock music to be meaningful on a human level. To get below the surface, to the human core of the equation. That necessarily involves painting pictures of things that aren't pretty.

I like pretty things. I like trying to twist words in elegant ways and frankly I often prefer to use euphemisms and metaphors instead of bluntly expressing ragged thoughts. That's just my vocabulary. But pretty lies can be the most ugly thing of all, because they are are fundamental trafficking in falsity. And in a way, the flip side of that rings true -- that there is a beauty in honesty, even if it is jagged or jarring.

While on that thought, here is a video performance that I recently came across of Kawehi performing a solo cover of "Heart Shaped Box" using looped vocals and keyboards. It's very cool:

That song itself is rather...abrasive, one might say, in its lyrical content. But it's also very powerfully expressive, not to mention a very good melodic composition, as Kawehi demonstrates through her arrangement and performance.

I feel like my focus is drifting a little bit. So, to wind myself down before I trail off onto some other tangent...

This week does have meaning to me, in ways that it would not have had in the past. I'm used to that sort of thing, in general. I often find myself liking or appreciating various things either before everyone else, or after everyone else. I'm sort of out-of-phase with mainstream humanity, or something like that. (Did I mention that I might be an alien?) It all kind of speaks to the circular nature of things, I guess.

When I think of Kurt Cobain, the first thing that comes to mind is sympathy. Was he selfish or delusional? Maybe, probably, I guess. But I've experienced enough myself to know/feel that none of us are as far from the edge as we might like to think that we are. I don't view it with cynicism. Tragedy is tragedy. And we can never know what another person is really going through. It's all very sad, in this case.

The positive takeway, and the better note to end on, is that it mattered to people's lives. And improbable though it might be, it inspired people. Not how it ended. (That should not be any sort of anything except a downbeat and a cautionary tale.) But the reason that April 1994 still resonates today is not really about a death, but about the life that preceded it. It wasn't pretty, but it mattered. It did then, and it does now.

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