Key Entity Extraction I: Domino The Destitute

Key Entity Extraction I: Domino The Destitute. 

They say that springtime is the starting of a new page. Things are new, winter is over, and it's time for the fun of summer to begin. To me, the new page begins in autumn. It's fantastic. I think it has a lot to do with autumn being the beginning of the school year, which to me defines a brand new start. When I was a Junior in college, I discovered Coheed just before they released their bombshell Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Vol 1: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness. It was excellent. All of my friends spun this album non-stop all through the fall and well into the winter months. I think the rotating waned when Tool's 10,000 Days came out, more as something new, as we had to have heard the album hundreds if not thousands of times. To me this album has always been a time machine. Throw that album on with a slight nip in the air and I can feel the exact same way that I did during that year. Many albums have this effect for me. I guess that's why I got so excited when C&C decided to drop their latest single just at the beginning of fall. I gave it a brief listening a few weeks ago and didn't think much of it. To me it sounded like an In Keeping Secrets copy and nothing much more. Recently I had to travel for work and had the opportunity to be in a car for about 11 hours. I threw the single on my iPhone and decided to give it another go. That's when I fell in love. This song is dope. 

This song does a great job of throwing all kinds of callbacks while still being a totally new thing. I've never been one to claim that I understand what Claudio's story is about. Personally, it seems a lot more like he writes songs about whatever he wants and then tries to work it into the "mythos". That doesn't detract from the fact that this song is great. With Josh Eppard back in the fold, I expected C&C to return to their style of "groove" playing, but this song doesn't do it in the traditional Coheed fashion. During the verses, the groove is there in a powerful way, but it comes in in such an off way that you never really feel it as a groove. It's just a powerful pulsing backbone. Then you have the anthemic chorus that this band has mastered since album 1. The "this is a war" line is heavily reminiscent of the Willing Well series of the bands third release. They even manage to work in the "I'd do anything for you" line that permeates nearly every album of their catalog. I love it. 

This song is not something that could have been written by the band in 2003, or even 2007. This song has a maturity that I feel a band only has when they have had a decade of music in the pocket. It's the same adventurous songwriting with a tightness that you get when you've been making music as long as they have. I cannot wait for this album to drop in a month and get to have yet another autumn time machine with Coheed and Cambria.

A Supposedly Fun Thing....

Let it be known, I LOVE David Foster Wallace, in a big bad way. On the day he died, I was in grad school. I found out while picking up lunch for my now-wife and driving out to see her for between grad school (me)/ work (her) meeting in the park. I stopped off at our apartment to grab some lunch things when I noticed my brother was online. He told me David Foster Wallace died over AIM, and I immediately checked wikipedia to confirm. I drove to my wife in a daze and told her the news. She knows I like him but that's as far as her knowledge goes. She gave me a "that's too bad" response, but I was crushed. I was in a depression for months. Since then, I have gone on a full fledged craze to acquire everything I could by him. Every stray article. Every book. Then somewhere in the midst of this I caught myself and realized that this man's body of fantastic work has now become radically finite, and I need to meter out what I have left over the span of my remaining days. I've tried to read Infinite Jest a handful of times and always lost interest about 300 pages in or so. The first three hundred pages are fantastic, and I go through the full range of emotions during the read, including side splitting laughter that has gotten me several glances in public places. I'm not exactly sure why I lose interest, but for now, I am much more interested in Wallace's non-fiction. During my grad school days, I donated plasma to help subsidize the pittance I was given as part of a research assistantship (for which I will be forever grateful, but realistically it wasn't a lot of money). I devoured A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which was a recent Christmas acquisition. It is by far my favourite thing I've ever read, especially the title story. 


Recently my friend JB told me he had bought some DFW books for some bathroom reading. This spurred me to cruise the DFW wiki, which I do every couple of months or so. I found out that there was a new Simpsons episode entitled "A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again". I had to see it. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find. In the past I've been a massive hater of all things Simpsons. I'm more of a Seinfeld guy. However, the fact that they would do a show that even referenced my favouritest of people was worth looking into. The episode was actually pretty funny. Being a new father, I saw Homer's rant about going on vacation being a "24-hr babysitting job" in a totally different light than I would have at any other point in my life. There were only two DFW references in the whole show, one of which was the title, and the other being another bum cruise ship the Simpsons are almost coerced to taking, which was named the Nadir. It was excellent. Then, somewhere in the middle of the show, I saw DFW sitting at one of the tables in the dining room of the cruise line. It made me light up quite a bit. DFW, you will be missed. 

First Post

This blog will be one of the many facets of the 2.718281828 Productions banner. Here I will discuss things that come under my radar and come out through my prism. This will come primarily in the form of reviews of various forms of media I've been digesting in recent years. Hopefully I will be able to review new products, but I also plan to delve back into my archives and tell stories of music and other media that has profoundly shaped me throughout the years. I hope anyone who comes across this site can enjoy these stories and share how these same pieces have affected their lives in different ways. I tend to have a very sarcastic tone, but believe me, it is always meant in the same way a young boy is mean to the girl he likes the most.