there is a car dealership in Ohio that recently had to pull an ad campaign proclaiming "Jihad on the auto market" and offering free toy swords to kids waiting in the show room on "fatwa fridays"...ahahaha, why is this so funny to me? I can't make links happen but surely overlord Drew can prove I'm not totally insane.
Drew's edit: Aaron is insane, but here is the link to the jihad article.
9/25/06
Alaskan Revolution
Citizens of Alaska,
From the beginning of the settlement of our great state, we have prided ourselves on our independance. The last frontier our wilderness was called. From the rocks of Homer to the high rises of Anchorage, from the glaciers to the tundra, our beauty is unmatched. It is time, my friends, for our government also to be unmatched.
We must ask ourselves a question: Do we want freedom from the oppression of a federal government that knows nothing of our ways? Our do we want to continue to bow to the tyrants in Virginia who've never seen a noble caribou? It is time for us to plant our feet firmly in the permafrost and declare an Alaskan Revolution!
Freedom from the constraints of a fascist rule! Freedom from the controls on our liberty! We demand self-rule. We damand autonomy. The Nation of Alaska must rise!
And a beautiful place it will be. Free enterprise will flourish with the removal of unjust legislation on horticulture. Society will flourish with the removal of unjust legislation on marriage. Our economy will flourish as we begin to sell our rich oil to the highest bidder. Flourishments will flourish.
And what will the 49 states do about it? They'll feel like fools marching an army across Canada. In fact, the Canadians will no doubt be sympathetic to our struggle and impede the coming storm troopers. And what Yankee army can fight through near twenty-four hours of light or darkness? Our uncommonly long and short days will confound them!
My friends, my fellow Alaskans, there is no better time than now to fight for what we want for our children. We must unite our passion for justice like the five fingers of truth, freedom, representation, self-actualization, and decency into a might fist to strike at the wicked federalists.
For Alaska. For Freedom.
From the beginning of the settlement of our great state, we have prided ourselves on our independance. The last frontier our wilderness was called. From the rocks of Homer to the high rises of Anchorage, from the glaciers to the tundra, our beauty is unmatched. It is time, my friends, for our government also to be unmatched.
We must ask ourselves a question: Do we want freedom from the oppression of a federal government that knows nothing of our ways? Our do we want to continue to bow to the tyrants in Virginia who've never seen a noble caribou? It is time for us to plant our feet firmly in the permafrost and declare an Alaskan Revolution!
Freedom from the constraints of a fascist rule! Freedom from the controls on our liberty! We demand self-rule. We damand autonomy. The Nation of Alaska must rise!
And a beautiful place it will be. Free enterprise will flourish with the removal of unjust legislation on horticulture. Society will flourish with the removal of unjust legislation on marriage. Our economy will flourish as we begin to sell our rich oil to the highest bidder. Flourishments will flourish.
And what will the 49 states do about it? They'll feel like fools marching an army across Canada. In fact, the Canadians will no doubt be sympathetic to our struggle and impede the coming storm troopers. And what Yankee army can fight through near twenty-four hours of light or darkness? Our uncommonly long and short days will confound them!
My friends, my fellow Alaskans, there is no better time than now to fight for what we want for our children. We must unite our passion for justice like the five fingers of truth, freedom, representation, self-actualization, and decency into a might fist to strike at the wicked federalists.
For Alaska. For Freedom.
Easily Accesible Alternate Realities
Today I went over to my friend's house in Marin County. To say "Marin County" to most of you means nothing because you are from Seattle, Portland, Idaho, other places. However, to most people in the SF Bay Area if you mention Marin a set of images will invariably come to mind for them. Marin is probably one of the wealthiest counties per household in all of America. Many celebs including Sean Penn and George Lucas live there and nearly all the houses are monstro-like in size but with 1/4 the occupancy and no vermin. I know Marin well because I went to high school there and after a few years away to gain some perspective I have gotta say there is no where else quite like Marin to find a bunch of people who are living in a totally different reality. Marin is a hub of new-age, hippie, progressive lifestyles and philosophies. The onus for this post came from a dinner my friend made me at her apartment tonight. She is in a holistic, organic health culinary academy right now and as she cooked the food (which for the record was unbelievably good) she launched into multiple lectures to me about how we are poisoning our bodies with the food we eat and how the answer is in refrigerating your grains and soaking your nuts and tons of other food health tips that seemed so insane to me I actually smiled and listened and considered them. This person also purifies her shower water and burns "essential oils" near her bed at night to help purify a variety of things I surely am not in touch with. The thing about Marin is the people there certainly do have the money to exist in these lifestyles and it may darn well be much better for you to live that way, it just isn't practical for 99% of humanity and that is where Marinites fail to see clearly. They are nearly militant about their way of life and how you actually cannot eat at Burger King because once you know too much you can't go back. Next time I'm in Berkeley I'll tell to the starving college kids on the street and get punched in the goddam mouth. I do however, love going over to Marin every now and then because for the $3 bridge toll I can zip across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge and without doing LSD, Acid or any other hallucinogen, fully immerse myself in a whole other reality. To close I will tell you a brief story about going over to this girl's house once a few years back. Her mom greeted me and I said hi to their dog, which is 15 years old or something like that and the mom told me how she has the dog on all these dietary aids and takes it to a therapist. She says all of this totally deadpan and straightfaced and it took me a terrifying to realize she was dead serious so I had to bite my lip hard. Then she waved a crystal filled with some fluid near my body and watched the fluid. "Good," she said, "your life force is strong." And she was dead-fucking serious.
9/23/06
No one gets to walk between the rain
I'm pretty fatigued. I spent today hanging flyers on rich people's doors in Piedmont for Gorilla Gutters for $8/hour. I was assured as a huge job perk by the people I did this for that I had to have "zero interaction with other people" and could listen to music so I loaded my ipod into my pocket and started walking. Since I just finished a 190 mile hike it was not really any trouble for me to walk around on sidewalks all day and since they were paying by the hour I planned to just do it all day. All the other people this company hired got blisters and tired after a few hours so they got sick of waiting for me to finish and pulled me in the afternoon. I was walking around a real wealthy neighborhood and I noticed that I think nicer houses have door handles as opposed to door knobs. What's the deal with that? I was also considering that if I told anyone excitedly that I worked as a day laborer for a low wage with the hope of potential but random bonuses they woudl think it was lame. I am, after all, a college graduate with a degree in politics, I should be changing the world, remaking it in a better way and leaving it far more well off for future generations. Today however, I got great exercise, got to listen to music and got paid. I see nothing wrong with that. Anyways, I'm going to see the A's clinch the AL West pennant tomorrow and for anyone who saw me over the years at Whitman you know how much I love the A's, they are the epitomy of what is great about baseball, that will be a whole different post when they slay everyone shortly in the postseason. Today is also the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana and it is also was the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. With more disheartening news: that the hope for peace is in its usual place of the shithole I like that some common ground can be found at least in a common occurence. The title of the blog post is a lyrics of one of the songs ("No More") from the new Bob Seeger CD. The song has another profound lyric, It was 40 years ago when I was young/And the jungle not the desert heard the guns/Someone said they had a secret plan/And the rest of us were told to understand. War has been one of the most inevitable things in the history of humanity, it is just really fucking insane. Peace. Go A's.
9/22/06
Some Impulse.
I got the impulse to write suddenly as I was preparing for bed this evening. I wrote a rather verbose e-mail message to a few of my close friends about a situation in current events that is causing us much strife. After the e-mail was successfully typed and skimmed from grammatical errors (I never misspell) I sent my digital correspondece into the rubber-ducky-river-race-to-benefit-cancer that is the internet. I am once again abusing hyphens, and I apologize, it just feels good and Hedonism is so "in" right now. Anyway, after the e-mail was sent my writing urge was not satiated. I began to think about brevity, and how much meaning one possible sentence could have; how many ideas could be contained within one sentence and suddenly leap out at the mind like a jack-in-the-box once that sentence is heard. Then, as if my life was scripted, one inexplainable sentence popped into my head. Life is an interesting fabric. Why the hell did I think of that? I ate some undercooked chicken for dinner and I did drink two rather strong cups of coffee this morning. The sentence on the surface bears almost no meaning; it borders on nonsense. I started to think about it, and wanted to share it with a friend to see what effect this seemingly meaningless sentence had on them. There were none available. E-mail is too slow, a telephone is too personal, and my Buddy List was as empty as the 4th grade birthday party of the kid who pees his pants at recess. I was then slapped in the face that I had the ability to inquire using that ever so useful pocket utility Google. I clattered out "Life is an interesting fabric" into Google, and several pages popped up. It turns out these pages were uninteresting because Google searched for web pages containing each word independently, not each word in sequence. The advanced Google user that I am, I put the sentence in quotations and slammed down the "enter" key like a brass slammer flips over an entire stack of pogs. None. No web pages containing the obviously unique string of words "Life is an interesting fabric." A meaningless sentence.
Now, hopefully, next time you go to Google and type in "Life is an interesting fabric" you'll be referenced to this article. All of a sudden the meaningless sentence has meaning. As the theater production Harvey teaches us, if other people start to see your hallucinations too, then they just might be real. A rediculous trick, and I don't have a point, but perhaps you like the unique texture of silk, and find it pleasing to the touch.
Now, hopefully, next time you go to Google and type in "Life is an interesting fabric" you'll be referenced to this article. All of a sudden the meaningless sentence has meaning. As the theater production Harvey teaches us, if other people start to see your hallucinations too, then they just might be real. A rediculous trick, and I don't have a point, but perhaps you like the unique texture of silk, and find it pleasing to the touch.
My growing collection
A lot of people are unconscious collectors. The counscious collectors are people who make a concerted effort to increase their holdings. The other type of person may not even know they have holdings. Take my buddy Brian. He collects the remnants of given-up hobbies. The martial arts outfit he wore twice, the guitar he's played once, the RC airplane he never flew, and countless other forgotten joys. I know people who unconsciously collect everything from shoes and hats to travel books. My own collection is very conscious. I collect concert DVDs.
I think very few people actually start a collection with the intention of developing it; the collection just starts building up. That's how mine worked anyway. I guess there are probably some sad people out there who start their coin collections with those gift packs from Sky Mall. Not to digress, but I think it's sad when something packaged as a "gift" is bought for ones self. My collection started with a few concerts that were given to me, and a few more I bought myself. It wasn't until the last six months when I became conscious of my collection and began putting an effort in expanding its goodness.
The reason for my concert DVD collection is simple. I love music. Any regular readers of the blogue will understand that I have an almost spiritual (Drew's words, not mine) connection to music. It's not that I play it all that well, or that I have a preternatural grasp of music history and theory. It's that I geek out. Hard.
It only makes sense for someone who loves music to own concert DVDs. The digital nature of the recording allows for lots and lots of high-quality content, and in my limited lifetime, DVDs seem to hold up better than tapes and film reels. But all that is just the format, there's something so much richer about the experience of a concert.
No music fan will deny the power of a live performance. Certainly there are people who prefer studio work, and in the case of bands like the Beatles, you have no real choice, however for me, the vast majority of music is much more interesting to experience than simply to hear the sterile sound of recording equipment.
Today I bought The Grateful Dead Movie. This is a good example of what I like about the concert disc. First of all, the Dead are notorious for their live experimentation and improvisation. But one can always listen to any number of their live audio recordings. Jerry and the gang aren't all that exciting to see either; they don't dress up or jump around or any of that business. What the concert movie gives you, however, is the experience of the show.
A performance is more than just a band playing their songs on a stage. It is an ambitious recipe containing fans, technicians, and musicians: a whole show! You can't hear a show, you need to see it. And The Grateful Dead Movie is full of dancing hippies, wonked out lighting dudes, and of course Jerry and the gang. When I watch a good concert movie, I feel like I am not only hearing music, but experiencing a moment in history.
Seeing the English fans of Pablo Honey react to Radiohead's progressive shit off of The Bends at a 1994 show in Brixton. Seeing Jimi Hendrix light his guitar on fire at Monterey in order to one-up Pete Townsend's smashing act. These are experiences. I got 'em on video. My collection is growing and am happy as a lark.
I think very few people actually start a collection with the intention of developing it; the collection just starts building up. That's how mine worked anyway. I guess there are probably some sad people out there who start their coin collections with those gift packs from Sky Mall. Not to digress, but I think it's sad when something packaged as a "gift" is bought for ones self. My collection started with a few concerts that were given to me, and a few more I bought myself. It wasn't until the last six months when I became conscious of my collection and began putting an effort in expanding its goodness.
The reason for my concert DVD collection is simple. I love music. Any regular readers of the blogue will understand that I have an almost spiritual (Drew's words, not mine) connection to music. It's not that I play it all that well, or that I have a preternatural grasp of music history and theory. It's that I geek out. Hard.
It only makes sense for someone who loves music to own concert DVDs. The digital nature of the recording allows for lots and lots of high-quality content, and in my limited lifetime, DVDs seem to hold up better than tapes and film reels. But all that is just the format, there's something so much richer about the experience of a concert.
No music fan will deny the power of a live performance. Certainly there are people who prefer studio work, and in the case of bands like the Beatles, you have no real choice, however for me, the vast majority of music is much more interesting to experience than simply to hear the sterile sound of recording equipment.
Today I bought The Grateful Dead Movie. This is a good example of what I like about the concert disc. First of all, the Dead are notorious for their live experimentation and improvisation. But one can always listen to any number of their live audio recordings. Jerry and the gang aren't all that exciting to see either; they don't dress up or jump around or any of that business. What the concert movie gives you, however, is the experience of the show.
A performance is more than just a band playing their songs on a stage. It is an ambitious recipe containing fans, technicians, and musicians: a whole show! You can't hear a show, you need to see it. And The Grateful Dead Movie is full of dancing hippies, wonked out lighting dudes, and of course Jerry and the gang. When I watch a good concert movie, I feel like I am not only hearing music, but experiencing a moment in history.
Seeing the English fans of Pablo Honey react to Radiohead's progressive shit off of The Bends at a 1994 show in Brixton. Seeing Jimi Hendrix light his guitar on fire at Monterey in order to one-up Pete Townsend's smashing act. These are experiences. I got 'em on video. My collection is growing and am happy as a lark.
9/21/06
Mental Refuse Dump
Ahhh what up bloggernauts monstronauts astronauts cosmonauts earth people from right to left town to town cap and gown, since I've been gone Pluto has gone the way of the Dodo, Croc hunter has died and I somehow got even more attractive. I have a few main points to make with the usual lack of what some would call "flow" and "cohesion" but I say you motherfuckers oughta be tried for rhyme and treason.
I read this article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/15/BAG75L6BJK1.DTL and found it amazingly disturbing. Pretty much this is like what is fucked up with a lot of historical (and maybe current, these things take perspective, hindsight, etc.) U.S. foreign policy. Heralded to the tune of "scientific advancement" we have some invention that makes ants kill each other so they won't bother humans. That is like the US arming Iran, the Taliban, whoever to kill off its enemy del dia (sidenote: why is spanish never used to spice up sentences, it is always french or latin, fuck that) and then suddenly turn around some years later and battle those people with the newer round of weapons we haven't yet sold them.
Anyways, and this will actually have some semblance of a connection, I've recently been in the woods hiking for a long while and over the course of the journey some thoughts and realizations crossed my mind. One is that what we would probably all collectively deem "nature" is a very powerful force but in a weird sort of Jesus way. When I was hiking somewhere along the John Muir Trail I looked around and saw pretty much nothing but complete wild(er)ness around me. The only abberation to that was the thin slice of trail that wound its way through the terrain. That trail however, was to me a scar, a line marking a human cut beyond the slight impact that animal dwellers would make. A scar however might be the wrong term because scars are often looked at on the body as history and maybe something to learn from. You know, cat clawed half your face to shreds--->resolution not to make kissy faces in front of Fraulein any more. It seemed to me on this day on the trail though that nothing would really be learnt, maybe everything was backwards because from that scar, which actually now seemed more like an initial cut than a scar. From that initial cut I could see, just as I did as a young child in SimCity 2000 the towns and cities and industries and commerce building up from that initial plotting. And what does nature do? It turns the other cheek as it is encroached upon more and more. Finally, nature just peacefully walks off into the sunset when everything reaches a limit. The problem is that there is no way to know what the limit is, when you are nearing it or have reached it, I suppose you can learn to read signs, proverbial writings on the granite walls, but there's no science that can give you these answers my friend. Go to any big city and besides the created parks and corralled rivers, you will see no nature, nature has left. But then, yet again, another trick is waiting. Pretty much two years ago exactly I was in Washington D.C. interning two days a week at a magazine that I took the metro (underground subway) to each morning. To get onto the train at my stop I would ride an escalator more than 100 feet underground. Now Washington, D.C. would more than fit my criteria of a city that nature has run away from. But there, underground at the Tenleytown metro stop a ray of sunlight shown from far above and alit on a small patch of track. As I looked at the patch of light a tiny plant was growing out of the cement and very nearly winking at me.
Here is another thing that bugs me. All the time in school we'd read books. Fiction books, history books, politics books, etc. Now we are often asked to analyze these books in depth and encouraged by teachers or professors to take their words as holy. Now for the most part I am fine with that, reading a lot as a child is probably responsible for the vast majority of my reading/writing/intellectual abilities to this day. The things that irks me is that the books I have read are rarely put into perspective. By this I mean that if I am reading some political philosophy then I like to know something about the historical context it was written in, the author, what point in the author's life it was written, where it fits on a spectrum of popularity/ideology etc. What I often get is the expectation to read the book in a vacuum with the rationale that this is somehow more beneficial for me because then I can make my own judgements about it. Fuck that! I am not that fucking smart. The first (and only motherfucking) time I read Pride and Prejudice I didn't even know it was meant to be a farce or whatever and I was disgusted by it instead of wowed by its skill. Is that my fault? Maybe, but I am modern and suburban and liberal so I will pin the problem on others. I see nothing wrong in giving students or readers in general some hints as to how to read the book. I mean if you read Hobbes' "Leviathan" whilst knowing that Hobbes lived in a time of constant coups (Thailand anyone?) and instability it makes a whole lot of fucking sense and doesn't seem like the hard assed bad assed take no prisoners fubar philosophy that many might mistake it as. Learning about the 1960's as a kid in school without getting some basic understanding about how that (and it always blows my mind that for the most part these are our fucking parents) this was the first generation in America that had material and financial affluence in the country and a culture of plenty often leaves people spiritually deprived and seeking just leads to stupid ass misconceptions and stereotypes about protests and hippies and etc. Anyways, what got me thinking about this was this article I stumbled across today because I have been glued to my computer all day due to some intense back pain: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060825.wxboat26/BNStory/National/ It's about the academic, author and other things dude Michael Ignatieff and it is pretty much an 18 page overview of his life, all the different parts of it and I found it so interesting because a) I think he spoke at the '04 Whitman graduation and b) I read one of his books in a politics class and I was realizing while reading this that it's so important to understand the context of a book because take all the bloggernauts for example, we have all changed a lot over four years and will continue to change deep into our lives. Just like Picasso's art has a blue period, cubism and so on we all go through phases and I sure as hell know that if I was writing a book every two to three years I would probably not agree or believe in half the shit I said in the past and that past version of myself would feel the same way about future work. Whatever, I've made my point, context is important.
Another thing that bugs me is that despite continually enforced massacres and genocides there is always a spider visible somewhere in my room before I go to bed each night. Maybe I need to re-engineer its brain chemistry so it kills the next day's spider and so on.
I'm gonna get 50% Jumago on you real quick: Bob Seger just dropped a new album, "Face the Promise" that is his first album in like 11 years. He is the fuckin shit. He sings like all he has been eating since 1995 is rocks, dirt and car parts washed down with Penzoil. Now this is mainly from reading other reviews but what is tight about the album is that he hasn't changed his style one bit to cater to more recent trends in rock and roll. He plays a classic kind of rock and roll that is very close to country music in some ways but the retardation factor comes in when critics lament that "Seger has gone country" since he is doing what he's done all along and goddamit, that is rock and roll.
movie time!
"Little Miss Sunshine" is a bomb ass movie, I may have noted that in an earlier post but it's the last movie I've seen in awhile. New movies on my list are "All the King's Men" "Flyboys" and NOVEMBER FUCKING THIRD is the date that "Borat" drops. This is going to be the film event of the year. Borat is such an amazing character, I know Jumago appreciates this and Borat's Wikipedia site is absolutely the best read of the year, move over Dan Brown.
It's still movie time!
My parents have Netflix and last night my mom and I watched "The Story of the Weeping Camel" which is a sweet film about a rural Mongolian family. Pretty much the only main plot that advances throughout the 1 hour and 27 minute film is that one of the family's camels gives birth to a colt it rejects and a musician needs to come to do a ritual to fix it. This only takes like half of the movie and the rest of it is just mundane family scenes with the fully Mongolian cast, the film is also in Mongolian and is filmed absolutely stunningly. At the end of the movie my mom commented, "That was good, just really slow" and she was right but she meant the latter part of that comment in kind of a negative way and it got me thinking that the movie was even tighter than I originally gave it credit for. Most movies assume you have the attention span you probably have, 3 minutes so something has to explode or squirt out of an orifice in that amount of time or you are done and won't pay attention to the product placements to follow. This movie paints a picture of the plodding rural lifestyle of this family and magically the pace of the movie seems to follow the pace of events that are being depicted even though that is obviously not true. Another subplot is that the youngest child wants a TV because he has seen them on excursions across the Gobi Desert into a small town. It was a good 1 hour and 27 minutes, didn't blow my mind, but instead implanted a foreign culture and lifestyle into that unexploded space.
Peace.
I read this article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/15/BAG75L6BJK1.DTL and found it amazingly disturbing. Pretty much this is like what is fucked up with a lot of historical (and maybe current, these things take perspective, hindsight, etc.) U.S. foreign policy. Heralded to the tune of "scientific advancement" we have some invention that makes ants kill each other so they won't bother humans. That is like the US arming Iran, the Taliban, whoever to kill off its enemy del dia (sidenote: why is spanish never used to spice up sentences, it is always french or latin, fuck that) and then suddenly turn around some years later and battle those people with the newer round of weapons we haven't yet sold them.
Anyways, and this will actually have some semblance of a connection, I've recently been in the woods hiking for a long while and over the course of the journey some thoughts and realizations crossed my mind. One is that what we would probably all collectively deem "nature" is a very powerful force but in a weird sort of Jesus way. When I was hiking somewhere along the John Muir Trail I looked around and saw pretty much nothing but complete wild(er)ness around me. The only abberation to that was the thin slice of trail that wound its way through the terrain. That trail however, was to me a scar, a line marking a human cut beyond the slight impact that animal dwellers would make. A scar however might be the wrong term because scars are often looked at on the body as history and maybe something to learn from. You know, cat clawed half your face to shreds--->resolution not to make kissy faces in front of Fraulein any more. It seemed to me on this day on the trail though that nothing would really be learnt, maybe everything was backwards because from that scar, which actually now seemed more like an initial cut than a scar. From that initial cut I could see, just as I did as a young child in SimCity 2000 the towns and cities and industries and commerce building up from that initial plotting. And what does nature do? It turns the other cheek as it is encroached upon more and more. Finally, nature just peacefully walks off into the sunset when everything reaches a limit. The problem is that there is no way to know what the limit is, when you are nearing it or have reached it, I suppose you can learn to read signs, proverbial writings on the granite walls, but there's no science that can give you these answers my friend. Go to any big city and besides the created parks and corralled rivers, you will see no nature, nature has left. But then, yet again, another trick is waiting. Pretty much two years ago exactly I was in Washington D.C. interning two days a week at a magazine that I took the metro (underground subway) to each morning. To get onto the train at my stop I would ride an escalator more than 100 feet underground. Now Washington, D.C. would more than fit my criteria of a city that nature has run away from. But there, underground at the Tenleytown metro stop a ray of sunlight shown from far above and alit on a small patch of track. As I looked at the patch of light a tiny plant was growing out of the cement and very nearly winking at me.
Here is another thing that bugs me. All the time in school we'd read books. Fiction books, history books, politics books, etc. Now we are often asked to analyze these books in depth and encouraged by teachers or professors to take their words as holy. Now for the most part I am fine with that, reading a lot as a child is probably responsible for the vast majority of my reading/writing/intellectual abilities to this day. The things that irks me is that the books I have read are rarely put into perspective. By this I mean that if I am reading some political philosophy then I like to know something about the historical context it was written in, the author, what point in the author's life it was written, where it fits on a spectrum of popularity/ideology etc. What I often get is the expectation to read the book in a vacuum with the rationale that this is somehow more beneficial for me because then I can make my own judgements about it. Fuck that! I am not that fucking smart. The first (and only motherfucking) time I read Pride and Prejudice I didn't even know it was meant to be a farce or whatever and I was disgusted by it instead of wowed by its skill. Is that my fault? Maybe, but I am modern and suburban and liberal so I will pin the problem on others. I see nothing wrong in giving students or readers in general some hints as to how to read the book. I mean if you read Hobbes' "Leviathan" whilst knowing that Hobbes lived in a time of constant coups (Thailand anyone?) and instability it makes a whole lot of fucking sense and doesn't seem like the hard assed bad assed take no prisoners fubar philosophy that many might mistake it as. Learning about the 1960's as a kid in school without getting some basic understanding about how that (and it always blows my mind that for the most part these are our fucking parents) this was the first generation in America that had material and financial affluence in the country and a culture of plenty often leaves people spiritually deprived and seeking just leads to stupid ass misconceptions and stereotypes about protests and hippies and etc. Anyways, what got me thinking about this was this article I stumbled across today because I have been glued to my computer all day due to some intense back pain: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060825.wxboat26/BNStory/National/ It's about the academic, author and other things dude Michael Ignatieff and it is pretty much an 18 page overview of his life, all the different parts of it and I found it so interesting because a) I think he spoke at the '04 Whitman graduation and b) I read one of his books in a politics class and I was realizing while reading this that it's so important to understand the context of a book because take all the bloggernauts for example, we have all changed a lot over four years and will continue to change deep into our lives. Just like Picasso's art has a blue period, cubism and so on we all go through phases and I sure as hell know that if I was writing a book every two to three years I would probably not agree or believe in half the shit I said in the past and that past version of myself would feel the same way about future work. Whatever, I've made my point, context is important.
Another thing that bugs me is that despite continually enforced massacres and genocides there is always a spider visible somewhere in my room before I go to bed each night. Maybe I need to re-engineer its brain chemistry so it kills the next day's spider and so on.
I'm gonna get 50% Jumago on you real quick: Bob Seger just dropped a new album, "Face the Promise" that is his first album in like 11 years. He is the fuckin shit. He sings like all he has been eating since 1995 is rocks, dirt and car parts washed down with Penzoil. Now this is mainly from reading other reviews but what is tight about the album is that he hasn't changed his style one bit to cater to more recent trends in rock and roll. He plays a classic kind of rock and roll that is very close to country music in some ways but the retardation factor comes in when critics lament that "Seger has gone country" since he is doing what he's done all along and goddamit, that is rock and roll.
movie time!
"Little Miss Sunshine" is a bomb ass movie, I may have noted that in an earlier post but it's the last movie I've seen in awhile. New movies on my list are "All the King's Men" "Flyboys" and NOVEMBER FUCKING THIRD is the date that "Borat" drops. This is going to be the film event of the year. Borat is such an amazing character, I know Jumago appreciates this and Borat's Wikipedia site is absolutely the best read of the year, move over Dan Brown.
It's still movie time!
My parents have Netflix and last night my mom and I watched "The Story of the Weeping Camel" which is a sweet film about a rural Mongolian family. Pretty much the only main plot that advances throughout the 1 hour and 27 minute film is that one of the family's camels gives birth to a colt it rejects and a musician needs to come to do a ritual to fix it. This only takes like half of the movie and the rest of it is just mundane family scenes with the fully Mongolian cast, the film is also in Mongolian and is filmed absolutely stunningly. At the end of the movie my mom commented, "That was good, just really slow" and she was right but she meant the latter part of that comment in kind of a negative way and it got me thinking that the movie was even tighter than I originally gave it credit for. Most movies assume you have the attention span you probably have, 3 minutes so something has to explode or squirt out of an orifice in that amount of time or you are done and won't pay attention to the product placements to follow. This movie paints a picture of the plodding rural lifestyle of this family and magically the pace of the movie seems to follow the pace of events that are being depicted even though that is obviously not true. Another subplot is that the youngest child wants a TV because he has seen them on excursions across the Gobi Desert into a small town. It was a good 1 hour and 27 minutes, didn't blow my mind, but instead implanted a foreign culture and lifestyle into that unexploded space.
Peace.
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