Author: Mike P. Lewis

Pearl Jam Revisted

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Today in 1991, Pearl Jam released their first album, called Ten, which was the number of NBA player Mookie Blaylock. The album sold over 10 million copies. That’s a lot. To compare, the top album of 2006 was Carrie Underwood’s which sold 3.7 million.

The band was orginally called Mookie Blaylock, but Eddie Vedder came up with the name Pearl Jam in honor of his Aunt Pearl’s homemade jam which supposedly is a natural aphrodisiac and contains peyote. (more band names explained here)

The album contains two-thirds of Eddie Vedder’s little known “Mamasan Trilogy.” In the spirit of rock opera, Vedder lays out a tale of a twisted life in the songs Alive and Once. The third song of the trilogy, “Footsteps/Times of Trouble” is on the Temple of Dog album. The story goes…the trilogy starts with “Alive” in which a young man’s Father has died and allows himself to be seduced by a older woman Mrs. Robinson type who also happens to be…err…umm…how to say this, well let’s just say maternally-related of the first order. This traumatic experience eventually causes the kid to go on a rampage falling down the ill-fated path of taking up serial homicide as a profession as told about in the song “Once” Vedder growls, “Once upon a time I could control myself.” And it all ends as our forlorn character is caught and lands on death row. “Footsteps,” finishes the trilogy off with reminisces of a doomed delinquent dallying his last days and lost in deep thought, regret, and denial from behind the bars of a jail cell.

Ron Mueck is the coolest artist i've seen in a long time

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Finally, a truly modern sculptor.

Ron Mueck is a London-based photo-realist artist. Born in Australia to parents who were toy makers, he labored on children’s television shows for 15 years (like Fraggle Rock) before working in special effects for such films as Labyrinth, a 1986 fantasy epic starring David Bowie.

Eventually Mueck concluded that photography destroys the physical presence of the original object, and so he turned to fine art and sculpture. In the early 1990’s, still in his advertising days, Mueck was commissioned to make something highly realistic, and was wondering what material would do the trick. Latex was the usual, but he wanted something harder, more precise. Luckily, he saw a little architectural decor on the wall of a boutique and inquired as to the nice, pink stuff’s nature. Fiberglass resin was the answer, and Mueck has made it his bronze and marble ever since.

His work is lifelike but not life size, and being face to face with the tiny, gossiping Two Women (2005) or the monumental woman In Bed (2005) is an unforgettable experience. The Big Man is in DC and i’ll definitely go check it out soon.

 

Continue reading “Ron Mueck is the coolest artist i've seen in a long time” →

It's not all technology – the arts matter too (Dana Gioia)

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Below is a great speech by the poet Dana Gioia to the Stanford graduating class of 2007….

Stanford Commencement address by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (June 17, 2007)

Good morning.

It is a great honor to be asked to give the Commencement address at my alma mater. Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person never really escapes his or her childhood.

dana.jpg

At heart I’m still a working-class kid—half Italian, half Mexican—from L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown—two films that capture the ineffable charm of my hometown.

Today is Father’s Day, so I hope you will indulge me for beginning on a personal note. I am the first person in my family ever to attend college, and I owe my education to my father, who sacrificed nearly everything to give his four children the best education possible.

My dad had a fairly hard life. He never spoke English until he went to school. He barely survived a plane crash in World War II. He worked hard, but never had much success, except with his family.  When I was about 12, my dad told me that he hoped I would go to Stanford, a place I had never heard of. For him, Stanford represented every success he had missed yet wanted for his children. He would be proud of me today—no matter how dull my speech.

On the other hand, I may be fortunate that my mother isn’t here. It isn’t Mother’s Day, so I can be honest. I loved her dearly, but she could be a challenge. For example, when she learned I had been nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she phoned and said, “Don’t think I’m impressed.” Continue reading “It's not all technology – the arts matter too (Dana Gioia)” →

Klosterman on Bonds

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Some people have asked me what i think about Bonds breaking the record.  In general i’m against it but i do recognize it as impressive.  I think Klosterman said it best (article here) over a year ago when he was close to breaking Babe’s record….

At some point in the immediate to near future, someone is going to throw Barry Bonds a strike when he should be seeing a ball, and he will rake it with extreme prejudice. His propulsive, compact swing will rock the sphere toward the roof of the troposphere; it will fall to earth roughly 440 feet from where Bonds is standing, and he will react as if he is: (a) unimpressed or (b) vaguely annoyed.

He will then jog 360 feet, and some people will cheer, and some people will have mixed feelings, and some people will have mixed feelings while they cheer. And that is because this particular raking will be the 715th home run of Bonds’ career, meaning he will have surpassed the home run production of George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

This is a problem.

It is not a problem the way global warming is a problem, nor is it a problem the way throat cancer is a problem. But it’s a problem for anyone who considers sports to be a meaningful prism through which to understand life and culture. It’s a problem for future historians, which means it’s a problem for us right now. The problem is this: It’s an achievement of disenchantment. And that applies to pretty much everyone involved, including you.

The reason we keep statistics — and the reason we care about statistical milestones — is that we assume some sort of emotional experience will accompany their creation and obliteration. These moments are supposed to embody ideas that transcend the notion of grown men playing children’s games; these moments are supposed to be a positive amalgamation of awe, evolution, inspiration, admiration and the macrobiotic potential of man. But the recent success of Bonds contains only two of those qualities, and maybe only the first.

It’s hard to feel good about that. Bonds is a self-absorbed, unlikable person who has an adversarial relationship with the world at large, and he has (almost certainly) used unethical, unnatural means to accomplish feats that actively hurt baseball. His statistical destruction of Ruth is metaphoric, but not in a good way. It’s an indictment of modernity, even for people who don’t give a damn about the past or the present.

Read the rest of the article here 

Reading The Beach at the beach

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On my vacation to the beach (picture of me below), i thought a good book to read would be the book The Beach. It turned out to be a great idea.

The Beach (the book) is a good read about an secluded beach community in Thailand. The community is populated by a bunch of travelers who have found a beautiful secluded beach and lagoon. They don’t do much but look for food, fix their community facilities, and smoke dope. But all hell breaks loose when more travelers start trying to find them.

It’s a quick read and worth plowing through for anyone who’s done any sort of traveling. Frankly, i was expecting more considering how so many people LOVE the book so i was a little disappointed, but regardless i recommend it.

Harry Potter & God

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I read an interesting essay on the plane back to DC which discusses the fantasy novel and its expression of God. It begins with Harry Potter and what the series says about us. Looking back on previous novels, The Lord of the Ring series had Tolkien’s Catholicism slant and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was a thinly veiled story about CS Lewis’ views of Anglicanism. JK Rowling’s story about Harry Potter has no view of spirituality or religion. Instead, Rowling focuses on love as the force that comforts and drives the characters.

Harry Potter lives in a world that has been scrubbed clean of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He is surrounded by ghosts, and has even eavesdropped on the afterlife in the basement of the Ministry of Magic, but Harry has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn’t. Not even the lovably prissy Hermione darkens a church door.

Perhaps it is because i’m single and 30ish and don’t see many of my peers hitting Church regularly, but i found this perspective interesting and strikes me as indicative of how many people are feeling these days. Disatisfaction and disillusionment of the Church is causing many to turn to themselves and more secular solutions rather than spiritual ones and I’m not sure that this is a good thing. As the article stated…

In the new millennium magic comes not from God, or nature, or anything grander or more mystical than a mere human emotion. It’s the most anthropo-centric vision possible: even in our fantasies, where we give ourselves permission to believe in dementors and blast-ended skrewts, love is all you need, and love is all you get.

What are your thoughts – is this really a reflection of society or just me?

Hippo craziness

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This is a bizarre story of a family that keeps a pet hippo. Not only is it a pet, but they feed it in the kitchen, give it a massage at night and have it sleep under blankets.

“i can’t tell if she sees me as a hippo or she sees herself as a human”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3NueKXS6dk]