As i wrote back in February, i really feel like the new Guns N’ Roses album is coming. I know people have been burned on this for the past 12 years, but i’m holding out faith.
In fact, i got my hands on the latest from Axl and it’s much better than then last single i got from the new album. The new song called “There Was a Time” is pretty good. Sure it’s a little over-produced, but it is great to have Axl back on the scene.
Download the new track HERE (click here)
We had another great beer scavenger hunt on Saturday. Over 40 people from 6 states participated in the 12th hunt since the creation of the beer scavenger hunt. The highlight was watching Matt L. eat Mexican straight off the plate and the lowest point was losing my phone and keys (phone was returned by a homeless man). I encourage anyone in any city to implement this festival of brews – it is always one of the best days of the year. Details on how to do so are here (click). If you do have a hunt, let me know and i’ll get it up on the beerscavengerhunt.com site.
Yo, check this out. It’s a video about Army infantryman Colby Buzzell’s ambush in Mosul. This event actually happened and this video is produced by PBS. the video is based on a blog entry that Buzzell posted during his Iraq tour — he later wrote a memoir published in 2005 by Putnam — and it originally appeared on the PBS show Operation Homecoming.
Crazy stuff. Makes you really want the war to stop.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=avHPWiwMpR8]
I recently read the book “Love is a Mix Tape” by Rob Sheffield. It’s a book about Rob and his wife: how they met, how they fell in love, how she died suddenly and how he’s coping with it. They were both rock critics so every step of the way, there’s music and a mix tape. It’s a sad book, but it’s a good book. If you want something to cruise through, and you like music of the 80’s and 90’s i’d recommend it. Some of my favorite passages:
Every time i have a crush on a woman, i have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo. No matter who she is, or how we meet, the synth-pop duo fantasy has to work, or the crush fizzles out. The girl is up front, swishing her skirt, tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker. I’m the boy in the back, hidden behind my Roland JP8000 keyboard. She has all the courage and star power I lack. She sings our hit because i would never dare to get up and sing it myself. She moves the crowd while i lurk in the shadows, lavishing all my computer-blue love on her, punching the buttons that shower her in disco bliss and bathe her in the spotlight. I make her a star.
The new wave girl knows what pop dreams are made of. She knows that Debbie Harry was just kidding when she sang, “Dreaming is free.” She knows dreams are something you have to steal. The new wave girl scams on other peoples identities, mixing and matching until she comes up with a style of her own, knowing that nothing belongs to her, that she just gets to wear it until somebody else comes along with faster fingers to snatch it away. She knows pop dreams are a hustle, a deception, a “glamour” in the witchcraft sense of the word. She knows how to bluff and how to scam. She sings about counterfeiting, shoplifting, bootlegging, home taping. She’s in on the hustle – you steal it, it’s yours, it’s legal tender. The new wave girl knows all this, which is why she is dangerous. The new wave boy knows how dangerous she is, which is why he stands behind her. The boy and the girl, together in electric dreams.
Because the book is mostly about his wife’s death, there are quite a few sad parts. Such as…
We drove away with nothing inside us. I talked to Duane a bit, kept repeating to her the line Harvey Keitel says to Tim Roth at the end of Reservoir Dogs: It looks like we’re gonna have to do a little time….Every time i started to cry, i remembered how Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn’t. Everybody nows what it’s like to drive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks.
The book is great to read and i especially like how he interprets Nirvana as a band largely speaking to us about marriage and how Biggie Smalls played a huge part in his mourning process.
This weekend, i went and saw the third installment of Spider-Man. I loved the 2nd film and thought it was one of the best superhero movies ever made (although not as good as Batman Begins) so i had high hopes for S3. And i’m sad to say that it was disappointing on every level. The story was bad, the action was average and the dialogue was atrocious.
In the first two films Peter Parker was always a nerdy guy but you felt for him and wanted to see him succeed. But, in this film he was just creepy. Throughout the movie, he is either staring at MJ in a stalker-like way, wandering around with a goofy grin on his face drunk on fame, or when he’s infected by an alien goo just behaving completely odd. I kind of wanted him to get his ass kicked.
The action scenes were nicely constructed but weren’t that interesting. I always hate it when it seems that neither super-hero can die. I mean it seemed that The Sandman was completely indestructible. I mean there was no way he could die so why do we need to spend 10 minutes watch them punch each other? Every movie has good special effects these days, i’d like to see some scenes that are unique. The Matrix came out 8 years ago and those fight scenes are still cooler than any of these.
Scenes i think spidey-sucked:
I’m eagerly waiting for the movie and i thought hard about getting a pair of these babies, until i realized that i’m no longer in middle school Check ’em out: Transformer shoes! (link)
More photos after the jump
Continue reading “One More Way to Say You're a Dork”
I’ve always been a White Stripes fan and i’m also quite a big fan of Michel Gondry. I never thought either of them would sell out and make a Coke ad. But the ad is really pretty cool. The song in the ad is written by Jack White called “Love Is The Truth.” As the song goes, a young woman (who looks like Meg White) walks through a candy-like world where everyone and every animal leaves behind an image of himself or herself. The film is edited by Michel Gondry who i wrote about a few weeks ago (and posted a video of him doing the rubix cube with his feet).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9zgT3WzTVA]
According to Franz (the European academic) in Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We’ve always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That’s what enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry
Continue reading “Fortuitous Beauty of New York”
A couple of years ago i read Bill Mckibben’s book Enough. It’s a great read. In the book he discusses what it means to be human. There are 3 subjects he focuses on in the book: genetic research, nanotechnology and robotics. In each one he explores that ever shrinking moral and spiritual boundary. Eventually, we’ll get to an “enough point” where we should stop trying to push the limits of technology and medicine.
My favorite part is the discussion of genetically enhanced children and how science (and our ambition) continues to push the limits of what is possible and how children, in enhacned, will never be strive to be great or to achieve as pianists, painters, or athletes because of their “programming.”
I always like Mckibben’s summary of the state of affairs and the recognization of trends in society both on a cultural and technological level – and he does a great job here. Here, more than his others he looks at the family structure and how it has been altered due to television and he doesn’t paint a good picture…
So, in the last century, the invention of the car offered the freedom of mobility, at the cost of giving up the small, coherent physical universes most people had inhabited. The invention of radio and TV allowed the unlimited choices of a national or global culture, but undermined the local life that had long persisted; the old people in my small rural town can still recall when “visiting” was the evening pastime, and how swiftly it disappeared in the 1950’s when CBS and NBC arrived. The 60’s seemed to mark the final rounds of this endless liberation; the invention of divorce as a mass phenomenon made clear that family no longer carried the meaning we’d long assumed, that it could be discarded as the village has been discarded; the pill and the sexual revolution freed us from the formerly inherent burdens of sex, but also often reduced it to the merely “casual.”
…how all this has happened and what it means to us…
Whether all this was “good” or “bad” is an impossible question, and a pointless one. These changes came upon us like the weather; “we” “chose” them only in the broadest sense of the words. You may keep the TV in the closet, but you still live in a TV society. The possibility of divorce now hovers over every marriage, leaving it subtly different from what it would have been before. What’s important is that all these changes went in the same direction: they traded context for individual freedom. Maybe it’s been a worthwhile bargain; without it, we wouldn’t have the prosperity that marks life in the West, and all the things that prosperity implies. Longer life span, for instance; endless choice. But the costs have clearly been real, too: we’ve tried hard to fill the hole left when community disappeared, with “traditional values” and evangelical churches, with back-to-the-land communes and New Age rituals. but those frantic stirrings serve mostly to highlight our radical loneliness.
All of this makes me hate myself for loving the show Seinfeld, which is actually just a show exploring what it means to live a life that has no meaning. It is true, when i look around I see a world where there’s nothing but consumption – and when Mckibben points it out, I had to step back and let out a big whoa.
Where it all ends – the mindless consumption, the lack of context – is that we need to take a stand as individuals and produce context for ourselves. If genetic engineering takes place, the human race can lose the ability to be an individual and for each person to have meaning. If technology continues, we can continue to go beyond nature to a world that is completely unrecognizable. McKibben concludes that it is our capacity as humans for restraint-and even for finding great meaning in restraint. “We need to do an unlikely thing: We need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough.”
As a lover of technology and change, the concept of “Good enough” is quite a thought. You should definitely read this book.
Said much better than i could….
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-KYhc_J8s]