Thursday was payday, and I treated myself with a trip to Border's. My main reason for going was to purchase the Heaven and Hell DVD, which I found (although it was in the "B"'s, because of course "Heaven and Hell" is just a name Black Sabbath used on tour this summer - to separate it from the Ozzfest band). I had forgotten just how good some of the songs - "Children of the Sea", "Neon Knights", "The Mob Rules", and of course "Heaven and Hell" - are. If one ignores Dio's histrionics and the silly lyrics, losing oneself in the music, it's surprising how good, especially when one considers these are the same musicians who gave us "Black Sabbath", "War Pigs", and "Paranoid" (great songs all, but hardly in a class with the group named first).
I also got the first season of the Chris Carter show Millennium. Again, I had forgotten how intense this show was, how close to the edge it always seemed to run, how little light and joy there was. A show about the persistence of evil, and what happens even to the best people who spend too long exposed to it - some of the best, yet most disturbing, television ever.
Finally, as a bonus, I found the most recent Symphony X CD, Paradise Lost. For those who might wonder, it is exactly as the title says, a musical rendition of Milton's poem. Exactly the kind of thing rock critics hate prog for, a pretentious, over-technical, self-indulgent wallowing in complexity and obscurity. Born to Run it isn't. Since we have Bruce Springsteen still, always capable of giving us the best of what he does, it seems to me no need to reinvent that particular wheel, so the complaint of so many critics about prog makes no sense to me at all. It is what it is, and if they don't like it, there are plenty of things worth listening to. I would only say that, while it hardly destines the band for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this is a very good album by a very good band. Here's the title track:
