Self Indulgence

  Working on Overkill by the Australian band, Men at Work.  I have a working demo up on my website with no vocal track yet.  I'll probably add some StratCom audio bytes to it and, of course, attempt to sing again.  It was partially recorded in Drop-D tuning and gives the whole mood a dark side than the original.

For your amusement:   www.mikecronis.com
Oh, there's a cool game shooter up on the website too for July but it's being replaced soon so enjoy it while you can.

LarkBurger

   Most people know I'm an avid fan of burgers.  I love 'em.  It's what I base the entire restaurants on if they serve 'em.  Basically a simple concoction to which so much love can be generated.  There are places that throw a frozen puck on a griddle then onto a no-name brand store-bought bun, and to those who insult the diner, I man-slap them in the man-face.  On the other extreme, there are some restaurants that have their own in-house butcher and grind the smaller end of the tenderloin (fillet mignon) of an Angus or Wagnyu (kobe beef), bake their own roll, import or craft their own cheddar, and slaughter their own pig for bacon to make a sublime, perfect bacon-cheddar burger of which one would weep and receive the Key to the City! (I've determined if one gets the Key to a City, one can enter any lock within the city limits at-will).
  I analyze, dissect, discriminate, and fall in love or hate with a burger more-so than I do with anything else, even people, motorcycles, or cars!  I must admit I really disseminate all of these things to far more than most humans do, or even animals.  For instance, with cars, I get to the point of steering-wheel-material-feel and analyze things like the underside of the hood and character of engine note.  A critic of all things?  Hardly.  More of a lover of all things.  I have passion for them, and burgers are my speciality.
  It's easy to dismiss a restaurant for its burger, or a restaurant altogether for its failings.  Yesterday, before watching Pixar's Brave (a decent film, as usual, as Pixar can do no wrong), I stopped at...

  Larkburger is a new-ish place for Colorado Springs, home of the shitty chain restaurants.  We literally have hundreds, if even thousands of fast-food chains and the like.  Surprisingly, no White Castle or Friendly's or some of the other east-coast offerings.  I like to equate Colorado Springs fine dining as "watered-down ketchup", and not the Heinz variety, more like store-brand "catsup" not even worthy of a capitalization of the "c" like some submissive unworthy of a proper-noun designation.  Let's review...

  So upon entering, you're instantly greeted to the dining area in a minimalist orgasm of a room.  Square with wooden walls and track-lighting.  You have to navigate through the side of the dining area unsectioned to order your food.

  This configuration works somewhat, such as in Noodles and Co. and a few other "hip", California-based dining environments, but burger dining is intimate.  Another burger joint that attempts this is the infamous Crave Burger which uses donuts for buns, puts whipped cream and Reese's Pieces on their burgers, and it might as well have Tic-Tacs, Snicker's, butterscotch, hot-fudge, thumbtacks, and oats on them as well.  I refuse to even weigh-in Crave Burger as it's so hideous and vile that it's only for 420-friendly diners looking to satisfy that Jones'n for flavor-rapesplosions in their mouth-face.  Yuck.  One design that this seems to work for is Five Guys where it comes off as a New York beach-style Boardwalk-type burger joint with no pretensions.  Five Guys wants to be cheap-looking and low-key like a burger place next to a pinball arcade, and it works.  With Larkburger it fails miserably.  These are not photos by me, they're from online.  The place I went to near The Southern Cross shopping center near the Broadmore had no designated area to approach the counter in the back of the store such as the third picture.  Notice the awkwardness of the diners sitting seemingly naked and exposed.  This is not a place you'd take anyone you'd want to have a conversation or care about.  It's near-clinical in its sparseness as if Borg created it.  The place looks unfinished.

  Now some people might like this Web 2.0 design of minimalism, but I find it pathetic.  Even the menu is Web 2.0, taking an almost extreme Gordon Ramsay approach of just a handful of items to choose.  The menu is deceiving, as in reality there's only about 5 items you can buy, and the others are variations of "halved" items or one-condiment-added items (such as the truffle aioli.. really?  Truffle oil?)

  As you can read, there's pretty much the 'burger' followed by a turkey-burger, a tuna-'burger', a veggie-'burger' and a salad.  If you're trying to get tuna, turkey, or a veggie-burger you're weird or on some sort of fast and your significant other wants a burger and you have exception items to choose.  No one's going to go to a burger place to order these things, they're consolation prizes so you don't have to starve.  The 'gluten-free' bun is a modern joke.  If you need to eat gluten-free, you should probably get yourself spade or neutered.  One in 10 billion people are gluten-intolerant, the rest that choose this are, again, trying to be hip, cool, and "healthy" without any research as to why you might not want 'gluten'.  It's just the fad.  Full-on gay.

  The shakes in a separate menu indicated were made from ice-cream from Boulder which turned me off right away as Boulder can produce no good things.  The fact they offer "soy beans" is as gay as shit.  Frack-you for offering soy-beans.  NOW you pissed me off!

  So I get the pretty much only item on the menu, the "Larkburger" and the only real side item, "fries" and a Coke.  I add bacon and "Tillamook" cheddar (for an additional $1.50) and gluten-free air molecules al-dente con frack-you.  I'm handed a gay pyramid with a "12" on it and am encouraged to sit and wait and the food will be brought-en to me.  Fine.  I grab my Coke from a non-pretentious fountain and a few cups of ketchup (just in case).   I sit exposed with my Coke and wait, unenjoying the decor and realize I should have gotten drunk beforehand on Absinthe.  I notice the only "art" on the wall is such:

  Really?  Already I spotted a lie.  In point number one, they indicate their sauces are all in-house, yet there were packets of relish by Best Foods as well as Hunts ketchup and there were pumps of ketchup that were quite obviously Heinz as well as several other items like Cholua hot-sauce available at the drink-fountain area.  So these companies are putting no preservatives in their plastic packets?   I also did not see a 200 foot windmill on top of the building, or a slurry of them required to heat their grills. I'm sure XCel Energy from the city is powering their lights and they're using electric or gas grills.  Liars.  Pathetic liars.  I'm excited, however, for the Black Angus Beef as, as they indicate, is chosen for its superior marbling, etc.  It is not chosen for that but whatever.  I'm more concerned which part of the Black Angus cow is being used, such as the eyeball, hoof, or spleen.

  I'm growing more annoyed with the trendy "Eco-Green" theme as it's all in-your-face about it.  It'd be okay if they briefly mentioned it in passing but it's like a screaming liberal that just wants to get up in your face and stink garlicky demands of Eco Superiority at you for an hour without working out the math on it.  Sure, you can be wind-powered, or at least lie about it, but what was the cost of creating the windmills and batteries required to store the energy?  What's the "carbon footprint" of that?  To eradicate the environmental impact those two items created, to include the copper wire mining, shipping of giant windmills by way of diesel train or truck, etc., etc. it takes several hundred years to just break-even.  The Toyota Prius is a fine example of that, it not breaking-even for its carbon-footprint-damage for several decades, and its cost-saving never being realized by the owner for 10 years over gasoline.  Indeed, Car & Driver did a study where removing all the electrical components for propulsion for the Prius, running merely on it's gasoline-assist engine actually created better MPG, speed, handling, and efficiency that actually having the electric motor in the first place!  Liberals not doing their homework again.  Pathetic.  But.. like singing in Church, it makes you feel better about yourself, though you've done no good to mankind, just in YOUR MIND.  Pathetic.  I give them all one coin such that, well, it's a start, and they probably mean well.  They're just stupid, and probably very gay.

  I look around some more and realize I'm an ogre in this shop.  Everyone is that Boulder-trendy well-dressed but trying way too hard to look poor look.  Coloradians will know what I'm talking about: the $200 polo shirt that looks a bit worn and the Birkenstock sandals.  No one is wearing jeans.  No one.  What planet am I on?  I myself wearing a "How many licks does it take?" Tootsie-Pop shirt with carpenter jeans from Wal-Mart and Asic black sneakers.  It's obvious I don't belong here.  I'm not fake enough.

  After about 10 minutes, the burger arives in a minimalist packaging.  It looks pretty okay.  The fries are nearly 1-dimensional, having length only, but no width or height like a line on a Cartesian Plane from pre-algebra I took in 8th grade.  The fries were unseasoned and painfully flavorless.  No salt or anything was added to these lines in a box, and they were soggy-ish.  Pretty sad and I dismiss the $2 as a collateral-damage failure.

The fries here are seemingly thickened than what I received so humans can see the 1-dimensional illusion

  I pick up the diapered burger in it's little box and take a bite.  Well, I taste genetically-engineered-tomato-for-shipping in a beefsteak variety, its skin so thick you'd think it was grown in Siberia.  A mysterious water-goo drips violently down from the bottom of the diaper.  The burger peed on me, and a lot.  Now I myself seemingly need a diaper as I wipe up the spill with eco-napkins supplied in an eco-container.  I don't remember ordering pee in my burger.  Guess it's Eco.

  I find my way to the supposedly famous meat they keep talking about and.. unseasoned and flavorless.  The entire burger sans Tillamook and bacon (which taste just as such) is flavorless.  Nothing.  Like eating water.  Like eating the recycled cardboard boxes the food came in.  Seriously.  Empty.  I eat half of it.  Nothing.  I do like the bacon and cheese, as that's all I taste.  I hope maybe these two non-Larkburger items are overshadowing the subtleties of the burger in some way.  I hand-tear a piece of the obviously frozen patty off and pop it into my mouth, carefully savoring it.  Nothing.  No soul.  Like zombie-meat.  I feel suddenly very sad.  I look around and everyone seems happy for some reason, and I can't understand it.  They're enjoying their burgers.  Why?  Are they professional actors for my behalf to try to make me think that, well, maybe I'm wrong?  I want to grab one by the lapel and demand, "Get out of my HEAD, man!"  I add a little ketchup.  It's not like I smoked a cigar today or anything, or burned my tongue on my exhaust manifold of my Saturn Sky Redline.  Again, like an animal (to these people) I tear-off another pre-frozen bite.  The consistency screams of pre-frozen.  Happily, it's cooked medium-well as I had asked, which for Colorado standards pretty surprising.  I try the bread by itself.  Nothing.  Flavorless.  Toasted nicely though. 

  So.. the cooks are doing the best they can with the materials they're presented.  It seems the management is loathe to season anything.  The meat quality is sub-par, probably online with the now rarely ordered McDonald's single cheeseburger minus salt or pepper and not as flavorful.  Honestly, I can't remember having a burger that tasted like nothing before.  The legendary "marbled" consistency is a punchline in their ad.  There's nothing marbled about it in the same way Oscar Meyer Beef Bologna isn't "marbled".  Like the patrons enjoying the place, the food is soul-less and flavorless.  I can only guess the diners were happy it was pseudo-eco and so they felt they were doing something good in some way.  Overall, the experience was like eating wet cardboard with Tillamook cheddar (aged 1 week) and Oscar Meyer thick-cut bacon.  Empty and devoid of any pleasure, I got back in my car and watched Pixar's, Brave with the consolation of white cheddar'ed popcorn and Raisenettes.  At least those three things had flavor.

  Larkburger is a Nihilist theme-park for those with no soul.

Caveat Emptor!

Rock and Rule

 

   So on a whim about a year ago I put a "SAVE" out on NetFlix for the movie inspired by The Devil and Daniel Mouse (1978) by the same Canadian movie company, Nelvana called, Rock and Rule:  came out in 1983 and unlike the previous offering is far darker, and 1:17 versus 0:22. 


  It's Nelvana's first feature film and was released in Europe and Canada but not in the US for some reason.  Stars Debbie Harry (aka the lead singer of Blondie for those old enough to know, she did such songs as Call Me, Rapture, and Heart of Glass, all of which were pretty intense for 1979 to 1981 and floored America at the time.  She was sort of the Pink anti-sexuality tough-girl who'd use you and spit you out and you'd thank her afterwards kinda girl.  Rock and Rule also stars work by Iggy Pop as Mok (though Mok's theme song is sung by Lou Reed, the same guy 30 years later helped destroy Metallica utterly with a little album called Lulu.. you can hear the similarities.  I admire their attempt at getting away from palm-muting every damn album and every damn song in pentatonic-minor but.. um..)  Also the movie stars Cheap Trick and and outro of Earth, Wind, and Fire.

  The movie is a post-appocolyptic rock-opera that was popular for the time, such as Heavy Metal, Streets of Fire and Kiss meets the Phantom of the Park, et. al.  Honestly, I feel bad for kids growing up now.  They have no rock heroes, albeit Gen-Y'ers had a lampoonish The Darkness 10 years ago that mocked the genre by way of Queen.  Gen-Z'ers have squat, effeminate male heroes trying to save the ecology while getting kissed by men taking psycho-warping drugs.  Aldous Huxley's dream Brave New World never seemed so poignant.  When I grew up, these themes of rock bands conquering evil were everywhere, often in medival or post-appocaylptic worlds, usually involving magical rock guitars that can shoot freakin' lazer beams, drums creating massive earthquakes and the like.  A fellow bard I chat with at work quip of guitar pedal combinations that create and summon such high-level-magic beasts and weather patterns and the dangers of certain codes based on tone and pedal colors.
  The movie is about a rock band who's female singer is discovered by Mok, a rock-sage who's computer informs him her voice can open gateways to a dimension where a demon can enter to destroy the current universe.  Hungry for power, though mistaken he can control it, he abducts her and cybperpunk-style wires her brain up to the computer to make her sing the right combination of notes.  The remaining band tries to save her.
  At first, I thought this work was by master-animator Ralph Bakshi whom had animated The Lord of the Rings (which I thought was far far far superior to the live-action version, as yes, Balrogs are NOT 200 feet tall, they're 12 feet tall, and yes, they have wings of shadow and have an energy whip as a main weapon, and Peter J. copied a lot of the scenes directly from Bakshi's time-consuming work, it takes a month to do 5 minutes of animation at that level).  Ralph also animated American Pop, Wizards, Cool World, Fire and Ice (think of an adult HeMan of which Filmation Studios borrowed from), Heavy Traffic, Spicy City (note* Spicy City episodes may not be work-safe), and the infamous Fritz the Cat which, actually compared to modern cartoons is not that edgy with only a few nude scenes.  Ralph's work is edgy and wrought with suggestive sexual content, brief nudity, and adult situations and themes and vulgar language.  Honestly, it mimics life, or at least a portion of life.  Disney hated him for it, as they embrase the sacharine of their sing-songs, all except exiled Don Bluth of Secret of NIMH, Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Robin Hood, Jungle Book, All Dogs go to Heaven, Titan AE, etc., fame. 
  Though the vibe is the same, I was mistaken.  Ralph had nothing to do with it!  I was floored.  I adore animation.  I love all forms of it.  Like comedy, where different styles exist from Brian Regan to Andy Koffman, as long as the point is projected, it's a display of expressionism, art, and story-telling.  This truly was a hidden gem made recently available on Blu-Ray (I watched the edited DVD version) now unedited and actually comes with The Devil and Daniel Mouse included.  Debbie does a good job singing and the whole rock-opera is class-A.  I'd say it's inspired by Ralph's LoTR but mixed-in with Heavy Metal into a pot and left on simmer and add a little William Gibson's Neuromancer to boot.  The characters are pretty interesting but a bit one-dimensional, and the side-members and henchmen are goofy and unbelievable, but it's still a great romp and good fun.