G'bless IMDB.

Otherwise, when I suddenly started wondering if Janelle Voight (T2) and Diamondback (Near Dark) were played by the same actress, I'd have to fast-forward through the movies to find out--

--oh, hell, and I couldn't even do that. No TV ATM.

Writing.

It is the gift of a writer a quality writers hope to attain, I think, to be able to take something inchoate but definitely existant and lay it out in a way that lets their readers get a handle on it. Articulating a problem often makes it seem more manageable. Articulating something so that it's more manageable for someone else is downright impressive.

Eric Burns' writing--over at Websnark--often makes me gleeful; he nails things *beautifully*, for comics or games or fiction, things to do with pulp and heroism and horror and nobility and hope, lays them out in a few strokes without dissecting them into guts and bits.

These things are mostly things that make me happy.

I realized today that he can do the same thing with real-life events that are really not, I don't think, making anybody happy. At all. Reading what he had to say about Chris Benoit was not, in any sense, an enhappying experience.

But it helped.

?Cyber?-punk tangent

Well, you can't turn him into a company man,
you can't turn him into a whore.
And the boys upstairs just don't understand anymore.

So, I was putting a dent in the dishes, and I am suddenly overcome by a desire to hear Tom Petty's "The Last DJ". I've always liked it (although I honestly never remember it's Petty). It's a pretty standard lone-wolf/artist/truthspeaker thing, I guess. And I've had the CCA and Dr. Frederick Wertham[1] kind of in the back of my mind since mid-late afternoon, which was probably part of it.

Well, some folks said they're gonna hang him so high
cos you just can't do what he did.
There's some things you just
can't put in the minds of those kids.

And now, mind you, I'm reminded of that radio DJ in The Stand--Ray Flowers, I think?--who wasn't getting sick, and who showed up to the (empty) station, and just ran a no-time-delay no-ads call-in show for people to discuss Captain Trips. (And the Army showed up and they shot him and he died sprawled over his control panel.)

But that's a *real* tangent. Anyway, I was listening to the chorus.

There goes your freedom of choice,
there goes the last human voice.
There goes the last DJ.

And I start, in defiance of all things reasonably associated with the decades-old vibe of this song, thinking cyberpunk.

Not the hard-edged metal-laced chipped-brain gunfight side of it. The information. The truth. Max Headroom. Johnny Silverhand. Hiro Protagonist. Spider Jerusalem. Hell, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Even the grand revelation of the NES cure at the end of that god-awful movie adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic[2], although good god the execution on that mostly made me groan.

The angry, giddy, honest voice howling out in the middle of the prepackaged indifferent monoculture that would really much rather you didn't think. And, by extension, the setting where you could fight *with* information, where it wasn't just a prize to squabble over and steal. The neon and glass and carded doors, not just the steel and bullets and (rainy) streets.

I need songs for this. Suggestions?

(And yes, I've already thought of Warren Zevon's Transverse City. :) )
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[1] *turns head, spits*
[2] I may be being a little harsh on it. I can't tell. I'm too busy being frustrated with how they portrayed Molly.