Archive for August, 2008
Friday, August 15th, 2008
It isnt a tragedy in the traditional sense, but to me, and apparently to a lot of other people, as is evidenced by the call Mike is getting today, this is a sad day. Chris ‘Mad Dog’ Russo is leaving “the mike and the mad dog radio program.” He was on the show earlier to explain himself and to say his goodbyes and he claims that he has no other job offers at the moment but the rumor is that he is going to Sirius for a mutil-million dollar deal. Regardless of the reason its going to be hard to turn on the radio between 1 and 630 everyday and not hear his annoying but infectious voice. he isnt dead although you would assume he was based on some of the calls mike has been getting but as a radio personality he will be missed. I listen to Mike and the Mad Dog everyday. when i was working at Gartner i listened to them on my computer and now that im not working i like to be in my car around 1 to hear the opening. And who the hell else am i going to listen to? Michael Kaye? I would rather listen to the sounds of airplanes crashing into the sides of mountains or the new Pussycat Dolls song. Im going to miss hearing Chris bury the Yankess everyday. But its funny. I am listening as i type this and the report came through that the Yankees have sent some guys down to the minors and the subject changed instantly. Fans are funny. I think my cousin Sean recently got a baseball signed by both Mike and the Mad Dog. That is now a valuable baseball my friend.
Posted in Sports, whatever | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 11th, 2008
I knew of Brian Blade through the work he did on Daniel Lanois solo records and live shows. Apparently he has also played drums on albums and tours for Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan as well as Wayne Shorter. All good stuff. To cut to the chase Season of Changes is by far my favorite album of the year, which is saying something because my guys the Black Crowes released an album that you can argue is the second best effort of their career. It is most certainly a jazz record but it doesnt feel like jazz to me. These arent just themes and chords here, The Fellowship band is dealing in loose and atmospheric songs however jazz like they might be. The albums third track Stoner Hill is going onto my list of Top 40 favorite tunes of all time. I have always loved Brain Blades drumming with Daniel Lanois. In those sessions he plays much less smoothly matching the violence and and unpredictability of Lanois live sound, but he plays so much differently here. He leads his band like a true old school hard bop band leader, he seems to direct every note of every song using fills that to me dont sound improvised. Do you ever notice that sometimes a song is perfect? Everything is perfect, not just the structure of the song or the lyrics or even the melody but all of the extra stuff thrown into a song for texture and balance, little vocal fills, drum fills, excess guitar runs, even mistakes. You listen to that song enough times and you cant imagine that song being played any other way. You see the band live and they leave out a few of those extra things and the song just doesnt hit you the same way. Thats what the whole of Season of Changes is like. allmusic.com gave it 4 1/2 stars but i dont see where there is room for improvement. A tremendous example of what music, true and pure music, can be. Unfortunately we dont get every many of those these days.
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Friday, August 8th, 2008
I have actually been waiting for this day for a long time although i was never really sure whether or not it would come. I was hoping it wouldnt but I was preparing myself if it did. Well today is ‘that day’ and i was not all that surprised. A group of Christian Barack Obama supporters are saying that John McCain’s tv spot showing Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea and then says, “he may be the One but is he ready to lead?” is portraying Barack Obama as the AnitChrist. here is a link to the full Time Magazine article: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1830590,00.html The reason i say that i was waiting for someone to come out and articulate this is not because i believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist but because i have so little faith in society and we are living in a time when the Left Behind series of books has sold 100 million copies. We live in a time when bending to the will of radical evangelicals will get you elected president. We just live in an era of intense American stupidity. Thus i was waiting for some crazy republican to suggest this or make reference to the antichrist while discussing Barack Obama, for the media to run with the story and then for the idiot masses to not even think about the context in which the statement was made but just assume that because they think they may have heard some one mention that Barack Obama is the antichrist that that is just as good as him saying himself on national television that he in fact is. That the plagues start at day break and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are flying from LA to start slaying the innocent. And wouldnt you know it, it wasnt just a cool team name for a group of wrestlers, Ric Flair and Arn Anderson really are two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The other two? Freddie Prinze Jr and Hillary Clinton because she will always be second fiddle to someone. However, I did not think that the suggestion would come from a group of democrats. By making these thoughts public it makes it ok for people, idiot people, to not only think this, because according to the article a large group of republicans already are, but to tell their friends that they are thinking it, which leads them to tell their friends they are worried that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and then they tell two people and they tell two people and so on and so on. This is how movements start people. This is how ideas are spread and added into the public consciousness. This however is not an idea that i think we should be helping to circulate. You have to use your head and a little discretion. You have to know what period of history these kind of thoughts are going out into. This country elected George Bush twice. The majority of this country will believe anything that you maybe-kind-of-sort-of-but-not-really tell them. what percentage of people still think Obama is a Muslim? Prolly a lot because people are stupid. There is no more eloquent way to say this. People are stupid. you have to account for that when you publish stuff like that. They do this kind of thing a lot in tourist locations, they will funnel tourists into a few specific tourist spots keeping most of them out of the towns where people live. We need to adopt something like this for stupid people. we need to confine there culture to a few specific things so Time will be able to publish informative articles on the group of religious democrats that think the McCain ad has Antichrist suggestions without having to worry about the idiot majority skipping over every word in the article other than ‘Barack Obama” “is” and “the AntiChrist.” Its just how we are living now folks. You apparently cannot run for president, be an inspiring figure and like Barack says, not “look like all the other presidents on the dollar bills” without people thinking you are the antichrist.
Posted in Politics, whatever | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
There is a not so new, but i suppose new in the scheme of literature new, genre of fiction based around authors who are incredibly smart but not as clever as they think they are. Its hard to say who started this genre and I am sure people will have different opinions than i do but I am going to say it started with my good buddy Thomas Pynchon although he is different from all the writers that came after him in that he actually is as clever as he thinks he is, more so in fact. He is the father. Kurt Vonnegut who I am not a huge fan of is the son and everyone else is just a child picking up the scraps that missed Pynchons mouth while he was busy devouring society. Who are these little children? These are the ones I am personally aware of, there could always be more: William T Vollman, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, TC Boyle, Chuck Palahniuk and we can now add Rivka Galchen to this list as its seconds grossest offender next to Jonathan Safran Foer who is the worst. A few of these people, Michael Chabon, TC Boyle, Jonathen Lethem, can almost stand toe to toe with Pynchon because they are technical craftsmen. They know how to construct sentences and phrases, they are technical wizards so when they dabble in the absurd, which is one of the keys to this whole genre, it doesnt come off as simply an interesting premise surrounded by a lot of fluff. They know how fiction works like Pynchon and Vonnegut did. The rest of them have their moments. They are all smart, most of them have Masters degrees from Ivy League schools, they can all be funny at times, although that doesnt apply to Jonathan Safran Foer, but their books are basically just premise festivals or showcases for how much smarter they are than you. Are a lot of William T Vollmans books unreadable? yes and he probably did that on purpose to show you how much smarter he is than you. This is very important to these authors, putting the reader in their place and that place is usually in the slums of the mass media trying to claw their way into the upper crust of literature and high culture which is where people like David Foster Wallace, William T Vollman and Jonathan Safran Foer think they reside. Rivka Galchen fits in well with this latter group. She has a degree from Columbia, she writes intelligently about meteorology, and she sometimes does nice pacing and atmosphere things with long passages of mostly dialogue. But Atmospheric Disturbances is all premise, the premise being a man for no reason thinks that his wife is not really his wife but a simulacrum. The book details his search for his real wife. it is about 200 pages too long and its only 240 pages. The majority of this book’s time is wasted exploring and detailing things that are not important to you or the story. It is 240 pages of nonsense with plot points thrown in at random intervals to move along the story. This is how all of these other authors are related to Pynchon. he was a master of disguising the useless as useful. Gravitys Rainbow could have been 100 pages long but it could also have been 10,000. You dont know, you dont know what hes getting at, you dont know if all the information in that book is trying to make 1 point or dozens of points or if he is really just messing with you and all he is really trying to say is that Slothrop had a lot of sex during World War II. Its impossible to know what belongs and what doesnt. Which is what all of the modern practitioners of this genre have failed to master. I didnt hate Atmospheric Disturbances but it was pointlessly difficult and during the two weeks it took me to read i constantly felt like i was wasting my time. I will call them the New Absurdists. Keep on Chooglin’
Posted in Books, whatever | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
Regular readers, are there even a half dozen of you, know that I am getting married in November. They dont know this because I talk about it a lot on this blog, i dont talk about anything a lot on this blog, but because they are my family and have known about the wedding for a while. People have offered me a great many congratulations and well wishes but nobody told me that planning the wedding would be so unbelievably horrible. I thought registering was bad but the process just gets worse and worse as the concept of other peoples feelings takes a more prominent role. I have read a library worth of literature about planning weddings and they all try to convince you of the same idea: This is your wedding, dont let people tell you how your wedding should be, the only opinion that matters is that of the bride and groom. I try not to swear on this blog because who knows who might be reading it but, HORSE SHIT. The place we are getting married holds 140 people we are inviting 158, which means that Mine and Nicolette’s thoughts, wishes and feelings account for only 2 of the of the total thoughts, wishes and feelings we are trying to accommodate. Its just too much. I suppose its like anything else, when ever someone has any kind of expectations they expect that those expectations are going to be met and its only when they are not met that theres going to be problems. The problem people run into, because i am sure we are not the lone people in the world who feel this way, is that these expectations are rooted in long standing general and specific to family ‘wedding traditions.’ I personally am not an advocate of the long standing unbroken tradition. I like starting new traditions, personal traditions. The idea of being tied to a set of social standards regarding weddings just seems really strange to me. there is a hidden culture to weddings that preaches individualism but is actually grounded in fierce traditionalism. Bill Hicks used to say that it is time to start a new religion because all of the pre-established ancient religions were no longer relevant to the world we currently live in. In a different and slightly less substantial way the same can be said about the modern wedding ceremony. we arent joining empires here or rival tribes. This isnt a marrige designed to combine wealth or family lands. if someone is left off of the list due to money and space considerations one hopes that they are not going to band their kin together and burn down a village. This isnt the Montagues and the Capulets (did you like that? Im smart!). i suppose there was a chance that Nicolettes cousin would challenge me to a duel and kill me because he isnt in my wedding party but we compromised and gave him another role allowing me to live another another day without a scimitar in my gut. This is all very complicated much more so than i thought it would be. It hasnt yet taken the fun out of the idea of the the wedding day but its frustrating. we need to adopt some new policies as a society regarding our nuptials. If anyone who is reading this is thinking about getting married themselves, dont feel like you have to obey the omnipresent wedding gods. Throw ‘em some curve balls. Lets starting taking the system down from the inside. Lets start small. We will work on that religion stuff later.
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