Some miscellany (aka I haven’t posted in a while)
It’s certainly jarring to have your morning coffee and crossword interrupted by an SUV ramming into a brick wall 30 feet from your bedroom window
In the same vein as my hypothetical dogs’ names (Tug Boat and Robert Zimmerman), I present the names of my fictional race horse (one grey, one brown), Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and Tin Roof Rusted.
I one thousands times over want to go to this.
I will never understand the appeal of True Blood. It’s so junky. While we’re at it, a few others things I will never understand: UFC (dumb and violent) and Sublime.
I just finished watching Moon and have sort of a strange complaint, the movie falls on a sword of it’s own initial success. Moon started so fast, answering questions almost as quickly as I could come up with them, and so well that I couldn’t help but be disappointed when the film slipped into traditional territory and now I find myself judging it more harshly than comparatively weaker films. I wanted it to be better than it was, but in doing so I end up missing out on a really well made science fiction movie that plays with simple but provocative ideas.
In a similar vein, I think this is my major problem with Lost. I held the final season to a ridiculous standard because it didn’t become one of the great dramas of all time. Lost threw a lot of interesting darts at the dart board, but tying everything together in a meaningful way proved impossible, which led to resentment as the show settled into a more traditional, reasonably well done, sci-fi tinged character drama. I know that it’s completely unfair to get annoyed at a show because it isn’t the best, but that’s what happened. Oh, and it didn’t help that the “whole every religion is right”, purgatory/heaven finale was hackneyed, maudlin garbage, but I digress.
Sometimes I worry that I’m becoming too cynical to enjoy anything, so I’d like to end this hate-cast with a mention of a few things that I really do love:
Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
In the Loop
Yesterday I bought a newspaper, a book and a record, went to a brick and mortar store and had them place an order on my behalf over the phone, and watched a baseball game, on broadcast TV, from start to finish. What year is it again? 1957?
This post will only obliquely be about basketball
An interesting take on facebook by Mark Cuban. The article hints at some of the issues underlying my decision to opt out of facebook. Foremost, any commoditization of personal information makes me uncomfortable, I don’t think facebook has sinister aims, but they are certainly treading on a very slippery slope. It’s crazy how much personal information people will cede in exchange for whatever convenience, organization and maybe sense of community facebook provides. Ten years ago, if someone would have posted their wedding photos, business contacts and top ten favorite movies on a public bulletin board, you would have questioned their sanity., now it’s common place and the bulletin board is one million times more accessible and corporately owned and controlled. Maybe I’m being an alarmist, but it seems to me that in the rush toward social networking we were quick to overlook the potential consequences.
Secondly, it seems to me that many advancements of the past few years have been about consumption and not creation. With the Kindle, the iPad, etc, what we get is a more efficient way to consume things which already exist, which is fine, just not when the counterbalancing creative outlets are shut down. Add in facebook’s binary like/dislike system and fan pages for everything from Sun Chips to comedians and it’s to start to see the beginning of the move away from individualism and toward contextualized consumption. Again, I doubt the aims are sinister, but, at least to me, it’s easy to extropolate a very bleak future from just these data points.
Third, progress is anything that removes from my life the ironic/non-ironic racist comments from my high school hoi polloi.
To prove that I’m not too far gone in my blissful Ludditism, here is a video of some talented dudes and ladies for you to contextually consume:
Record Store Day was the most fun I’ve ever had spending $120. I haven’t queued up outside a brick and mortar store since lining up outside a Tower Records in high school for Radiohead tickets. There is no finer way to start a Saturday morning then getting rained on with weird dudes in Devo hats. Once inside I picked up most everything I wanted, and a few impulse purchases. AKA even provided free coffee, which tasted like sewage, but was again, free, so that adjective wins. An over-caffeinated Meg Baird, who I’ve wanted to see for a while, played a solid free show on the 2nd floor loft. I even saw local Fishtown celebrity, Chris Wilson, drummer for Ted Leo and the RXers, but I didn’t get him to sign my Brutalist Bricks single, because that would have probably creeped him out.
Check out the score:
Don’t know whether to frame or play
Clear Vinyl!
An earnest blog post? I must be losing my touch. Probably all the Band on the Run I’ve been rocking.
It’s pretty amazing that the top 4 records of 2010 are already better than the top 4 records of the whole of 2009.
Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be, Ted Leo & RXers - Brutalist Bricks, Titus Andronicus - The Monitor and a new JNew joint? I’ll take my chances.
Also, I’m super Utah-Jazzed about this, hopefully it’ll be The Book of Basketball without the juvenile cursing, extreme homerism, weird stripper stories and pornography analogies.
