ZION?

Hagerstown Happens

Happened to catch a few Facespacers passing this around... Oh Hagerstown, Sweet Hagerstown, how I miss thee not.

Deep Sea Divers

The Sunset Limited

I stumbled upon this Cormac McCarthy film adaptation of his own play while flipping through the HBO Movies On Demand feature on my home television set. What initially peaked my interest in the film was the pairing of actors Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson, who play the respective characters White and Black. These are the only two characters in the film outside of a hypothetical voyeuristic neighbor, Cecil, and some references to people involved in each man's life.

For the duration of the movie, we are confined with the two men in Black's apartment after he saves the life of the suicidal White at a subway station. This leads to a lengthy philosophical discussion between Black, a Christian ex-convict, and White, an atheistic professor. The dialogue alone tells the story, powerfully exploiting the interpretations of life and death.

Delicious Kool-Aid

article

Today's Stories

I woke particularly early this morning, and decided to read a lil NYT before moving along. Two articles struck me.

• Reagan and Reality by Bob Herbert - Gipper's got a new documentary coming out! Looks pretty interesting, I'll probably check it out at some point. I'm glad someone finally made a movie setting Gip's past record straight. It seems like when Bush's dumbass was president the Right deified Reagan for some reason. I'd see folks on Fox News talking about how he was the greatest President in history, and I'd wonder if they were saying it purely to be controversial. Maybe because he wasn't seemingly as bad as Bush was at the time? In 2011 I do often think foldly of GW's memory (my logical side thinks it's just because I was younger during his time in office). It seemed not a day could go by without him screwing something up. Iraq? Tax cuts? Oil? By the end, when you heard that the economy was spiraling into the biggest catastrophe since the Great Depression - it was like, "No duh. Look who's been running the show." But I bet "Reagan" is worth seeing. Good characters back then. Americans. I don't know, I consider myself out-outspokenly liberal, and certainly left-wing, but I have to admit the Right does have some charm... Reagan, Bush, Palin, and don't forget smokin' John Boehner! Yeah, I expect better out of them and their policies have ruined lives, but when not looking at life too seriously, hey, at least they're Americans!
  

• Wall Street's Dead End by Felix Salmon - As someone who works in the industry it does seem like this is the direction American investors and corporations are heading... "as the number of initial public offerings steadily declines, the stock market is becoming little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money." Thanks partly to Reagan (and don't forget Bush) the rich keep getting richer, and the majority are none the wiser. That's what keeps Americans from rioting in the streets, the obliviousness to the great swindle, the loss in value.

NYT Cover

Maggie's Stage?

Question to the Queue:

1. Can you sing "Maggie's Farm" on the Grammy Awards without being completely ironic? In other words, can you say you ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more while singing in Maggie's kitchen.

Pearl Jam - Austin City Limits

Pearl Jam "Got Some"

You can view the performance in its entirety here.

They're Baaaaaaaack!

The Strokes "Under the Cover of Darkness"

Tell me...

Happy Worthdays

Texans — be it casual, be it actual. Said the groundhog to us (ofA), "Fuck that."

Love Is All There Is

Blogocaster: The Working, The Working, Just the Working Life

From Etsy's Blog

Does This Help?

Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

By: Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

SNL Digital Short

About A Dead Man

Last Friday, I hosted my 6th show at Harvest Records. It was called About A Dead Man — and it was about that.

Three years ago, I made a choice to dictate myself beneath the reign of one simple rule — bow thy head and draw. Employ only that of the subconscious to mute said action. Exhaust. At the present vantage, I feel genuinely weathered — and since, both nervously serious and seriously nervous. I would prefer to challenge last Friday's Opening with a new title: Closing — A Sloth in Destruction.

At the show, I introduced a series of small books intended to mature more dependently active directions.

Beady Eye 'Bring The Light'

Blogosophy: The Entitled

"You're down to the bedrock. A boolean or integer value is the digital equivalent of a grunt. You can't get any more basic than a like, or a thumbs-up, or a favorite. "

This is following in the trail of Net-Neutrality, the Chuck Klosterman article, and the Tumblr outage...

Happy New Year!

2010 - not a terrible year for ye posting on this blog, relatively speaking of course... I'd like to take a minute to say that I'm very proud of those who recorded and album, threw an art show, improvised comedy, shot videos, etc... I feel lucky to have friends that all have their own thing going on. Thank you also for contributing to the blog. I was going to say, "Without you, this blog would be nothing," and then I got to thinking, well, I guess it's already something. I mean 900 something posts, you know? But I don't consider webpages tangible objects, so maybe it's nothing after all. If all the lights went out, where would the site go? Luckily for us it seems more inevitable that our future masters, The Robots, will use this site against us (depending on who is in power).

Today I was perusing the Boston.com's "The Big Picture" site, particularly the 2010 round-up pics. I was really captivated by several pictures mostly involving big, global news stories from the past year. Some were easy to see and soak in their beauty; others extremely hard to look at. Pictures. Moments in time, you know... This world is pretty nutso, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. I was definably shocked by the more apocalyptic photos. Natural Disasters came hardcore in 2010 (so did unnatural disasters), and luckily none of us where physically harmed (which is what I was referring to by the "relatively speaking" comment earlier).

I wish everyone a Happy New Year.

THE BIG PICTURE

part 1
part 2
part 3

Blogournalism: Knee-Slapper

I don't think this is funny and not because I live in Brooklyn. I do appreciate it as a response to JoeScough (the idea of the iPad being the biggest media story of 2010 illustrates the distance some media figures have from important things - though I guess I am glad to hear that media figures' lives are changing).

I have some questions. Is Brian Williams jabbing just the NYT or media in general? Is he poking young culture's interpretation of capitalism? Did he have this written out before-hand? Why is JoeScough laughing so hard? Does Brian Williams think he can write a real piece of journalism about changes in the economy? Does his pronunciation of "borough" and "artisanal" reflect any form of classicism? When was the last time any of these people were not in a controlled climate? Are there hints of jealousy and insecurity in his longing to primitively sit and build a fire? Is it meta for him to sarcastically talk about people ironically wearing glasses? Why Marrakesh?