Blacklist Bottoms Out

 

Blacklist has been so bad the last two or three seasons, it's a wonder I watch it anymore. But I am, and it hasn't gotten any better. In fact, it has bottomed out. I mean it can't get any worse! Season eight is now underway, or maybe it's the conclusion of season seven? Whatever they were, whether they were season seven's conclusion or season eight's beginning, those two episodes were gawd awful.

So, we found out last season that Red is not the former lover of Lizzy's mother and had promised he would watch over her as if she were his real daughter. That was a flimsy way of explaining why he had shown the kind of affection and dedication to Lizzy as a real father would. And even though he has continued to show the affection and dedication of a real father to Lizzy for all seven seasons before this up to and including saving her life countless times, we have to watch this crap.

What crap? The kind of crap from Lizzy, I mean. Her entire role has bordered on boredom to stupidity to plain and simple crap.  Maybe it's not Megan Boone's fault. She has to play the role written for her, right? I mean, she doesn't have the kind of pull that a James Spader will have. Meaning, if he doesn't like what he's reading in a script, he can make it better. And if that's true, what the hell is he waiting for with the kind of crap we are seeing from Lizzy?

Is Spader content with shining, all the while allowing Boone to crap? Sheesh, is she nothing more than a foil to him? Does he believe that the worse she looks the better he'll look? Well, if he does, he's right and it's working. 

So, now, once again, for the umpteenth time, at the end of the last episode, (as in Season 8, episode 2) we have to watch Lizzy proclaiming how she's going to bring Red down, make him pay, utterly destroy him, and yadda, yadda, yadda. How many times has she made that declaration? I've lost count. Just like I've lost count how many times Red has saved her life!

And the combination of those two things truly makes this show suck. AND SUCK BIG TIME. I might use stronger language here, but I'm a teacher and I have to be careful what words I use. But this show sucks so bad that I wish I could use stronger language.

It's like the writers of this show had no idea that this show would last this long, and they don't know what to do with it. They probably had a good idea how the story would go for the first two or three seasons. But after that, it's like these writers are wingin' it. It truly looks like they are just trying to come up with something to last another season.

It reminds me of that other disaster of a show called LOST. They had something going for a bit, but then it was like they had no clue what to do with the story line after the first three seasons. They just winged it from there, and it had probably the worst series ending in the history of TV.

This is where Blacklist is going. For me, the ONLY thing that can save this show is if it is finally proven that Red really is Lizzy's biological father. How that can happen after he's already said he isn't her father, I don't care. Because if he isn't, then nothing about his show makes any sense at all. Because no one like a Red Reddington, or anyone I know even in the real world, would put up with a ridiculous character like Lizzy unless she really was his daughter. His real daughter. So let's see if that happens. Then and only then might I say, "Well, okay."

Blacklist is Back - But Do I Care?

 

Yes, season 8 of The Blacklist is underway. But do I really care? I do, but that care has been dwindling quite rapidly. Once upon a time this show was my favorite TV show. Oh, how times have changed. And during recent times, I have complained about this show more often than I have praised it. With good reason. It sucked the last two or three seasons.

I have lamented time and again how dizzy the female lead character Lizzy is. Thus the nickname for her, Dizzy Lizzy is more than apt. It suits her so well, in fact, that it should be her real name. Dizzy Lizzy. Yeah. Hollywood of late has become so obsessed with making strong female characters, (something I'm not opposed to, btw,) but in doing so, Hollywood has lost its grip on what, exactly IS a strong female character. Is this obsessive need for uncovering someone's "secret" something that makes a woman a strong character?

Rather, it makes Lizzy quite dizzy. Dizzy Lizzy. I would argue that respecting someone's privacy makes a character, any character, a strong character. In Dizzy Lizzy we have a woman who never knew her biological parents. But since becoming an FBI agent, she has come to know a man who has saved her life on multiple occasions. (I've actually lost count of how many times Red Reddington has saved her life.) She would be dead, dead, dead, if not for the intervention of Red Reddington. 

But does she have any appreciation of that fact? How about some gratitude? How about some loyalty or respect for the man to whom she owes her life? Um, nope. Instead, she can't get over the fact that he has a secret. It doesn't matter that he has proven time and again that he has Dizzy Lizzy's best interest at heart. What matters to Lizzy is that he has some kind of a secret and she just can't stand it.

So at the end of Season 7 we saw Dizzy Lizzy choosing to side with a mysterious woman, her supposed mother who she never knew, and after that same woman had put Dizzy Lizzy's only child into danger. And btw, she's a woman who had lied to Dizzy Lizzy when they had met to keep her own identity secret. (Talk about secrets!) On top of that this is the same woman who Dizzy Lizzy knows had murdered two of her fellow FBI agents even.

So yeah. Dizzy Lizzy sides with the mysterious mother who she never knew, and who was an enemy Russian spy, and who had lied to her, and who had put her daughter into danger, and who had murdered two of Lizzy's fellow FBI agents, instead of the man who has given her protection and has saved her life more times than I can remember. 

All of this is such crap, it's a wonder these writers are still employed by the series. I could write a lot better stories than this. I dare say anyone could. Except, that is, the writers who have the job. 

So I will watch the first two episodes of The Blacklist season eight during this holiday break, and see if these writers can pull themselves out of the hole in which they have dug themselves. It can be done. But it will take some mighty fine writing to do it. We'll see. And then I'll get back to you.

Catalog Complete

Volumes 2 and 3 are now up and ready to go on SoundCloud. And you can click on them on the sidebar if you care to. The music is great if I say so myself. My only regret is that I am not a singer. Nevertheless, the music is complete. It would be a dream come true if I had a real band and a real singer performing this music. But alas...

I was in a rock band years ago. It was a real rock band, with two guitarists, a bass player a drummer and a real singer. I was on the keyboards, of course, using an old-fashioned Vox Jaguar electric organ, and an upright piano.

But it worked. Unfortunately, my music writing at the time was in its infancy. I was only a teenager, and during that period of my life I had just begun writing my own songs. And I will admit even now, some of those songs were pretty darn good, even for a fourteen year old. (Which is when I wrote my first song.)

And during my teen years, I had written a small collection of songs, most of which I still remember. They are recorded on a cassette tape somewhere. Eventually I'll put  this collection of songs on another CD and call it Volume One - Rockin' the First Steps. They number about sixteen songs, which I wrote over a ten year period. From age 14 to about age 24. 

By then the band had dissolved and I focused on fine art instead of performing art. It wasn't until I was over forty when I went back to writing music again. I have chronicled what happened on this blog. To reiterate, it was after my fifth novel had been completed and published, I just got the music bug again.

So I bought new keyboards and got busy. And in the next three years or so, I wrote 120 more songs, which I put on volumes 2 through 13 and can be heard even now on SoundCloud.

I may get busy on my Volume 1 songs soon. But I'm getting back into my novels right now. I'm revising John Dunn; Heart of a Zulu and hoping to find representation or another publisher. I think that novel has the most potential, because it's a true story. And true stories are even better than fiction.

That's what I think anyway. We'll see how that goes. 

 I'm getting all of my music posted on SoundCloud. And now Volume 4 is on there. For a long time, Volume 4 was one of my favorites of all the albums I had written and arranged. Because of songs like Letting it Go, My Lady, and The Greatest, the first three songs on there, it held a special place in my heart. And then followed by songs like Rule the Day, and Legacy, I was particularly proud of this one.

Of course, that's not to say that the songs Never the Same, Those Were the Days, and Time Out were any less favored. And concluding with Wake Up and Crystal Ball were particularly encouraging to me. In fact, I was thinking Crystal Ball might have been the best of the lot.

The bottom line is they are all great. The playlist is as follows:

Letting it Go

My Lady

The Greatest

Rule the Day

Legacy

Never the Same

Those Were the Days

Time Out

Wake Up

Crystal Ball

I talked about this album in depth on an earlier post. I'll just conclude here by saying that I have redone the songs that needed to be redone. Particularly Letting It Go and Crystal Ball. Still I would prefer a real singer singing them. But I've talked about that too. It is what it is. Great songs, but less than great vocals. Oh well. It is what it is.

Volumes 5, 6, and 7 now posted

 I have Volumes 5, 6, and 7 now added to SoundCloud. I must remind anyone who happens to listen to them that I am not a singer. I only do the vocals on these volumes because, not only am I not a singer, I don't even KNOW anyone who is a singer. No relatives, no friends, and no colleagues or acquaintances of mine are singers. So what are you gonna do? You do it yourself.

Which is okay. No one knows my music as well as I do anyway. And maybe if I did know someone who was a singer, who says they would want to sing my songs anyway?

So whatever. If anyone can PRETEND that a real singer was singing these songs, then MAYBE they could use that imagination to appreciate the real music behind those songs. That remains to be seen. But if you are able to do that, then by all means, check out the music.

Volume 5 is filled with great songs. Volume 6 is filled with great songs too, but Volume 7 is filled with songs that can be called masterpieces, especially the first song, Dream. And even if I never write another song, these volumes would stand the test of time.

But who says I won't write another song? I'll get back to writing new music soon enough. Just have to post what I have up there first and then get Volume 1 finished. We'll see how it goes.

Volume 13 - Rockin' the Afterlife

Volume 13 - Rockin' the Afterlife wraps up my catalog of music. It's another concept album that didn't begin that way. It was just like Volume 12 in that I wrote all the songs independently of each other, but after the tenth song, when I sat down to write the lyrics, it became a concept album.

Song #1, Soul of Liberty is about life after death, but in the form of reincarnation. I do not necessarily believe in reincarnation. But the words were about that, so I went with it. And just like for the songs in Volume 12, each ensuing song became another song about that general theme.

It's a very controversial theme, I know, but it lasted right up to the final song on the album, Looking Back. Actually, both the music and the lyrics turned out to be very compelling. And just like for Volume 12, it's quite an adventure to sit and listen to this album, no matter how many times I have already. Sure there is mention of God, Heaven, Hell, different religions, and alternate realities. 

The bottom line is I don't care what anyone's religion is, or if they have or don't have one at all. But what is sure to come in everyone's life is death, as song #8 Sideways makes clear. And what happens at that point or after that point is basically what the lyrics are about. Come to think of it, the songs on this album explore that topic very deeply. 

So the playlist is as follows:

Soul of Liberty

Living in a Mirror

Not Your Show

Drum Beat

Time in the Sun

Kings Will Rise Up

Now You're There

Sideways

What Did You See

Looking Back

And Volume 13 in its entirety is already posted on SoundCloud. Just check the right margin of this blog. I had said I planned on posting all of my thirteen albums on there. And at this point volumes 8 through 13 are now up and running. (I just put Volume 8 on there this morning.) Just have to get 2 through 7 on there next, which I will in the very near future.

Volume 12 - Rockin' the Cosmos

 

So after 11 great albums of all original music, I created Volume 12 - Rockin' the Cosmos with one minor difference. It became a "concept" album. But it was not as if I wrote each individual song with a concept in mind. I wrote the songs like I always did, one after another and completely independent of each other. And after ten songs, like all the ones before, I decided to stop and write the lyrics. And it was then I started to realize I had a concept album in the works.

Song #1 turned out to be about an astronaut blasting off into outer space. I really didn't write the music with that in mind, but as the lyrics came into my head, and as I wrote them down, I realized this was going to be a concept album.

So Sensurround began the journey of a lone astronaut being launched into space and then getting lost "in a warping hole of time" as the lyrics explain.  And from there anything and everything was possible. Including the hallucination of a Green Lady dancing "along the edge of the wing" in song #2.

From there our space traveler laments the fact that he had been cut off from humanity In This Place as in song #3. And in song #4, his engines are dead, and he is drifting in a solar wind when he witnesses the Death of the Supermen, as he sees from his spaceship window a huge fleet of alien starships get wiped out by some unknown cosmic force.

But the alien space fleet was not the only thing affected. Our lone astronaut, being in the middle of the onslaught is somehow absorbed into the force and finds himself Merging with it in song #5.

In song #6, our protagonist realizes he is no longer what he used to be: a simple Spaceman. He is something else, with omniscient and omnipotent abilities to see everything and go anywhere.

And yet it wasn't so wonderful to him. In fact it was more Like a Curse, as he realizes in song #7 the consequences of being part of a life force that was so completely different than what he had known, that he has no ability to control its actions or the subsequent results of those actions.

And it was a realization that was most troubling in song #8. Because although this entity had the limitless power to create, its actions were almost always destructive. And considering the vast expanse of not only the galaxy, but of the universe, these actions were going to be Never Ending. 

Which meant there could be only one end result. Sooner or later this cosmic entity of which he had become a part would find its way to earth. And when it did, the fear of the consequence was a sobering thought to our protagonist. When that inevitable day occurred, he realizes in song #9 all he could say to his fellow human beings would be I'm Not the Bad Guy. 

Yet that day was years away. And after So Many Years, that day would finally arrive. But how many years had passed? So many, in fact, that the human race was hardly recognizable to our man. And thus the album ends in song #10 with that day approaching.

So even though I just listed the songs in italics above, the playlist is as follows:

Sensurround

Green Lady

In This Place

Death of the Supermen

Merging

Spaceman

Like a Curse

Never Ending

I'm Not the Bad Guy

So Many Years

Yes, this is the album I had in the right margin over the last couple of years. But the singing was so bad, I'm hoping no one listened to it. I have remade the songs now, editing a couple of them and re-singing all of them. That doesn't mean the singing is all that much better. Maybe it is a little bit. But I did eliminate that annoying saxophone track that had been on there.

And the album is available to be listened to now, posted in the right margin of this blog along with Volume 11 and my only other concept album, Volume 13, which I'll write about next.