monday mixtape justice
May 27th, 2013 by david brothers | Tags: furious 6, moviesEight songs, random order, you know the dealz.
-Statik Selektah – Mr Popularity feat. Consequence – Mr. Popularity CDS
-Glasses Malone – Respect Mah Gangsta – Drive-By Muzik (mixtape)
-Mobb Deep – Eye for a Eye (Your Beef Is Mines) – The Infamous
-Quando Nara Ri – Kassin+2 – Futurismo
-Nas – Fast Life feat. Kool G Rap
-NERD – Rock Star – In Search Of…
-Masta Ace – Dear Diary – Disposable Arts
-Gang Starr – You Know My Steez (Three Men and a Lady Remix) feat. The Lady of Rage and Kurupt – Full Clip: A Decade Of Gang Starr
Semi-random selection here. I chose songs that caught my eye on a fast flick-through of a random playlist. But it’s a holiday, so let me make this quick:
-Glasses Malone has an ill voice for a rapper. It’s perfect for gangsta rap, which Malone definitely makes. He’s like a west coast Trae tha Truth, in terms of being recognizable.
-Nas should be considered the greatest rapper of all time just for having the guts to follow G Rap on “Fast Life.” He should be knighted and sainted, because he ran a real risk of being martyred on that joint.
-“Full Clip” is the GOAT compilation album. I forget how ill Gang Starr was sometimes. I only started buying my own music around when Moment of Truth dropped (though Premo’s production never went away) so I think they were a little before my time, but every time I bump this album, man. It’s something else.
-“Mr Popularity” is one of my most favorite beats ever.
-Listen to The +2s. Trust me.
-Um… pass! I’m sure you all wrote very beautiful things last week that I read and enjoyed but apparently I was so preoccupied with real life stuff that I didn’t keep track.
-I did read and enjoy Fist of the Blue Sky, a Fist of the North Star prequel by Tetsuo Hara, Nobu Horie, and Buronson. It’s set in 1935 Shanghai, which is already a dope setting, and stars Kenshiro’s uncle. It’s good. I have two volumes, but the third is OOP and extra expensive. One day…
–I wrote about the fact that this week is my last week at the job I’ve had for around eight years, if you count time spent freelancing, and how I’m not as over it as I thought I would be. Cold as ice, ready to sacrifice, etc.
Furious 6, in a word? Fantastic. It was the sequel it needed to be, with a tighter script, impressive economy of storytelling, a few different hooks for entertaining spinoffs… it was a capital M MOVIE, is what I’m saying. Totally worth theater prices and blu-ray prices when it hits home release.
Who knew we’d get six of these?
Open thread. What’re you reading/watching/hearing/enjoying? Enjoy the holiday.
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Playing: Pushmo, a solid little 3DS puzzle game. The cute veneer they use to give it, I guess “a story,” is a little tiresome because it slows down play, but I really like sliding block-type stuff.
Watched: Arrested Development Season Four, the same as everyone else. I thought it was great. It wasn’t perfect, but it felt like the rest of the show – takes a while to build, eventually very funny. My expectations were maybe a little lower than a lot of other folks, so I just enjoyed an entertaining story.
Man, Gutsoon! imploded something fierce. I really have no idea what they were thinking, trying to run a weekly print anthology without establishing a presence in the US market first. Even Viz didn’t try it until they went digital. I also only have the first two volumes of Fist of the Blue Sky, as well as the first seven volumes of Fist of the North Star. I wasn’t actually able to find conclusive proof that volume eight ever made it to print. It’s a shame. They had some good series, but they made some crazy decisions, and the sales just weren’t there.
True story: when Gutsoon! elected to start an English manga anthology in the US, Japanese decision makers reacted with “if those turncoats can do it, then so can we!” and thus Shonen Jump USA was born. Yep, out of vindictive spite. Alas, there’s not really a significant market for adult mens’ manga in America now, let alone when Raijin was coming out.
It’s really too bad, since only a few of the comics that ran in Raijin ever came out in collected volumes. Perhaps only The First President of Japan (which was rad) got released in its entirety. The rest only saw the majority of their chapters see English-language release within the magazine issues, and most went unfinished. No fan translation efforts were undertaken to continue them (again, not enough fans), with the exception of some of the Tetsuo Hara things which has one super-dedicated guy cranking out fan translated scans of Fist of the North Star, Fist of the Blue Sky, all those other Fist of the North Star spinoffs/side stories, plus the ninja/samurai stuff like Keiji. That man is a true hero.
@Patchworkearth: I saw a fistful of AD episodes yesterday (my roommate had them on while I built+organized a bookcase) and they didn’t really take. I liked the old series, though I discovered it on DVD instead of TV, but I didn’t love it as much as everyone else did, maybe? Everything with Lucille sort of made me wish I was watching Archer instead.
I’m iffy on binging on comedy, too. How was that for you? I binged on Seinfeld, but more or less at a speed that worked out to a month per season instead of a half-season over a long weekend, and I feel like even that was too fast. Did you find that the fast pace made the show better, or did it just make the seams show more?
@Gaijin D: I totally missed out on Gutsoon when I was getting back into comics, so now I have a lot of books to find. It seems like most volumes run cheap, but a random middle volume goes for 40-60 bucks, at least as far as the FotNS and FotBS goes.
@Daryl Surat: I think I’d actually heard that story about Jump being a reaction to Raijin. All I really remember from the time, however, was looking at the price of each and deciding that while I could justify what Viz was asking for their monthly anthology, there was no way I could justify spending a few hundred dollars on Raijin, even if it was weekly.
@david brothers: Well, at least with FotNS, I think I went after them not too long after Gutsoon! collapsed, so I was able to get good prices on unsold stock before it became rare. I actually grabbed most of the volumes I have from a local comic shop, where they’d simply been collecting dust. Seeing that they weren’t going for big money on eBay or anything like that, the owner even gave me a deal. He also had a bunch of Five Star Stories volumes, but I didn’t have enough cash on me to buy more than a couple, and the rest were gone when I came back. Now that I think about it, I also found the English Mazinger comic Go Nagai did in the ’80s there, which I was able to learn very little about until years after I bought it. It’s a shame they went out of business. Who knows what else was buried in their back stock?
Reading: FuryMax, all caught up for #12 this week. I forgotten that Garth Ennis is THE best at war stories. And THE best at dialog. And that Goran Parlov is a freakin’ fantastic artist. Like Ennis’ other buddy Steve Dillon, his artwork doesn’t scream at you; so when the violence happens, it’s actually SHOCKING and has impact and weight to it.
Also, the Barracuda’s back, who’s like every black stereotype rolled into one(He slaps a guy with his dick in this one), but he’s so deliriously entertaining I find myself loving him all the same.
HAW HAW HAW
Playing: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. $15 dollar arcadey western FPS. Slick and surprisingly polished for a budget game, with an engaging narrative framework; the game is told in flashbacks of the protagonist telling tall tales to patrons in a salon. How he gunned down Billy the Kid, Butch/Sundance, Wyatt Earp, etc. It’s funny, and sometimes the patrons will catch him in lies, and he’ll back up and change his story, and the level changes around you. You got a 360/PS3/PC that can play it, I highly recommend it.
I think binging was the only way to watch it, really, because the thing was basically one long episode. It builds a little slowly and piles things higher and higher until the last few knock them all down. I suppose I’d have been less taken with them if I’d watched them once a week, but the season really wasn’t written for weekly serialization the way the earlier seasons were.
I’m not an AD superfan; I like the show a lot, and I think it’s very smart, and seasons 1-3 were very politically trenchant (and season 4 wasn’t at all, except for one cute bit in the Buster episode toward the end). But I don’t go around quoting it or acting like this season needed to happen. My expectations were pretty low going in, and I was surprised how well it ended up working for me.
Still have never seen a Fast or a Furious – can’t get a straight answer on where one needs to start. Are they all worth watching?
Watched it a couple of weeks ago now, but I really liked Universal Soldier: Regeneration. To quote Bobsy Mindless – “good [I’d say great] spacing & staging of fights” – and incredible mis-en-scene. It was a retroactive buy based on praise I’d seen for Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, so I’m looking forward to watching that.
I’d never seen the original so watched that beforehand… it was precisely what I expected EXCEPT for the revelation that Dolph Lundgren Can Act – I guess I’d only seen him in Rocky IV and He-Man?
Went through Gundam Seed Destiny and Gundam Wing series in and around the NBA and NHL Playoffs this week. I really enjoy the youthful passion exhibited throughout the series… but boy does it lead to some really dumb decisions. “I love this girl and you will not attack her…” even though she has just killed scores of people in her mecha… *shakes head*
Bookwise, I’m on the verge of completing my Secret Six and Incredible Hulk by Greg Pak collections. Cats in the Cradle was intense and Pak’s Heart of the Monster Hulk swan song is an overlooked soon to be classic…