Here We Go Again

Bringing it back soon. In the meantime ponder the exercise in duration that is one of my favorite pieces of avant-garde cinema: Michael Snow's Wavelength.

RIP Croc Hunter

Ok so Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter died from getting stung in the heart by a stingray. As sad as it is for anyone to die at such a young age, I can't say that we all didn't see this coming for a very long time. Also, fucking ay man, stung in the heart. I don't think you could go out in a more extreme way than that. I know who I'm drinking for tonight.

Does your chain hang low?

Jibbs has the late-summer jam on lock. In other news, the rundown on the weekend trip to Chicago:

Hip:
"Stoner Voice" ("Grab the wheeeelll duuuude"/"Whooooaaa Sluuuuts!")
DJ Battle in which DJ's weren't that nice but maintained hilarity through overuse of mouthed lyrics.
Accompanying hipset dj party with cast of characters including Theo, duo of bikini clad girls controlling the keg (dollar bills in the bikini strings included), and fashion dopplegangers
Babeasarus Rex's
Indiana rest stops*
Reckless Records
DJ Mavis
Gunner on the road

(* see babes)

Square:
3 people sleeping in Ace's tiny ass room
Sasha's berry wheat beer
Ace's mugging housemates
Chicago drivers
Dusty Groove Records

Snakes on a Plane . . .

Saw it about 12 hours ago after being totally late due to my flawed driving schemes and the theatre never having adequate directions. What to say . . . if you're reading this you're probably a friend of mine and thus will already be going to see this movie (otherwise I fail to see how we could possibly even speak).

I guess all I have to say is "wang biting."

Dada Overheard

Note to Self: Buy 9-Year-Old-Girl Costume to Wear to Art Openings

9-year-old girl: Mommy, please can we leave? This doesn't even make any sense! It's stupid.
Mommy: Sweetie, it's not supposed to make sense. It's senseless art. They're making fun of real art.

--Dada exhibit, MoMA

via Overheard in New York, Aug 15, 2006

This is the beat generation

Oberlin summer 2k6 dig this and dig it good.

Hip:
Surf-and-Turf BBQ
Bike-in-Movies/Cemetery Rides
Uncrowded Feve/Great Lakes
Ella Fitz
5 Across the Eyes House (projector, george the cat, friend's parent's basement appeal daddy-o)
Edmond T. Graville's 1961 classic "Beat Girl" starring Gillian Hills ("It's all so dreeeeaaary. I'm soooo boooooorrreed.")
Gunner

Square:
The constant threat of fleas

The Blogosphere

Get Outta Here Jive Turkey

Just read this article in the NYT regarding the Ohio governor's race and the overreach of the new voter registration policies passed in May. Though I sincerely hope and expect Blackwell to crash-and-burn for his shady politicking of late clearly the true importance of the story is Mr. Jive Turkey Sr.:
"Backers of the new regulations say they were needed, pointing to the fake names that appeared on voter registration cards in 2004, like Jive Turkey Sr.
'The new regulations have everything to do with preventing Jive Turkeys from showing up on cards the way they did last time,' said John McClelland, a spokesman for the state Republican Party. 'They’ve got nothing to do with suppressing voter participation.' But elections experts and liberal grass-roots organizations say the new rules go too far."

The word is out Jive Turkeys! Stay away from the Ohio polls!

Pros/Cons

Pros:
Sasha back in town (one day only event)
John Baldessari works and the Francis Alys black box @ the Hirshorn
Art history is finished
Yankees win/Red Sox lose
House comes with a ton of dishes

Cons:
Art history final
Your heat is like a lovewave
Straight outta Lo-Cash
Rhino Bar = Wannabe Boston
Room is painted yellow (though Sasha says it's a good color)

Last.fm Stole My Life Again

Hippiecons

Wonkette had an amusing link to an interview with Ann Coulter regarding her love of The Grateful Dead. It's as if the hippies and the ultra-convsevatives have overcome their obvious hatred of one another solely for the purposes of haunting my dreams. . . hippiecons!

"People are often incorrectly surprised that there are a lot of conservative dead heads. I’d mentioned that in an interview, and actually on the ‘Tonight Show,’ that one of my friends — who was a fellow Deadhead — would get up in the morning, smoke a bowl, turn on Rush Limbaugh, and start making his candles for ‘Grateful Dead’ merchandising." - Ann Coulter

We See As Through A Mirror Darkly

Saw "A Scanner Darkly" the other day which, contrary to it's generally positive reviews (thanks metacritic.com), turned out to be horrifically convoluted and dramatically flawed. Perhaps the most blatant failure was Linklater's inability to portray the mental split between Bob Arctor and Agent Fred and the character's inability to distinguish between the his two personas. Because of this, throughout most of the film it appears that the Bob is entirely aware that he's playing the role of Fred and that Substance D, as opposed to causing and increasing incapability of combining the memories/knowledge of each persona, merely causes a generalized sense of confusion and psychosis. The viewer is left confused as to Bob's actions (why would he knowingly spy on his life and the life of his friends even after it's made clear to him that he's specifically is suspect?) without adequately revealing the critically specific effect Substance D is creating.

Added to this failure of dramatic emphasis is the fact that the overarching plot of the attempt to discover the manufacture of Substance D is presented at a point in the film well beyond it having any discernible effect on the events that, up until the last 10 minutes, had been the main focus of the plot. We're left sitting through 3/4th of the film waiting for the conflict between Reeves and Downey Jr. to come to a head yet when it does it's played of as a minor detail only to be replaced by a painfully underdeveloped "plot twist" of negligible relation to any previous conflictual issues.

Concurrently, the final revelation regarding the character Donna was meaningless as Linklater failed to portray her relationships with Frank in any but the most shallow of depths and thus created little emotional resonance regarding the betrayal. Surprises such as this are dramatic largely because they necessitate a fundamental alteration in the plot. Yet, this development could have been entirely stricken from the film and absolutely nothing regarding the endpoint of the plot for Arctor/Agent Fred would have to have been modified.

All-in-all, the ideas of "A Scanner Darkly" are fairly interesting and for the most part the performances are enjoyable. I can readily understand those who have had previous experience with the work in it's literary format to appreciate seeing it's cinematic development, but for those of us with little previous experience with the Philip K. Dick story, Linkalter's adaptation was a muddled disservice leaving us unnecessarily more confused then the drug addled minds of the characters within.

Happy Birthday America

Back in VA after large chunks of The Twilight Zone in marathon form, a New Orleans benefit show that almosst turned into a roof collapsing disaster in and of itself, Russian accents, sparks at the strangers with candy movie in chelsea,$5 milkshakes, a million billion trillion stars, numerous looks of confusion, ordering only beverages at restaurants, 45 minutes of gawking at the sheer absurdity of trying to softly massage a passed out person back to consciousness, and fireworks.

Glad to see NYC is just how I remembered it.

Will it Ever Stop Raining?

The power is out yet again, the 3rd time in about a week, a fact that showcases the obvious technical wonder that is the DC Metro Area power grid.

Anywho, it’s been a busy past few days. Thursday was my first experience with Fort Reno, an annual staple of the DC summer music season that showcases local talent for free each Monday and Thursday at the eponymous named park. I didn’t quite catch the name of the band that performed this week as we showed up nearly two hours into the performance. The band was composed of teen-something high schoolers and the songs I did catch ranged in topic from the passé “I wanna drink a bottle of Jack and kiss your neck in the field,” to the creationist myth inspired “back when the earth was young and purple lava spewed from the mountaintops.”

Taking the metro on the way back to my house I was privy to an obviously wasted Ghanaian blatantly hitting on one of the only 3 other passengers on the train at that point. In fact, on an otherwise empty train, this man made the decision to sit next to the woman who appeared shocked at his misguided train etiquette. The situation only become more amusing when a group of 4 teenagers got onto the train and proceeded to run around showing the increasing number of passengers the erotic Simpson’s pictures stored on one of their cell phones: “I bet you never seen the Simpson’s do that!” They then proceeded to have a 20-minute conversation with the Ghanaian Romeo on the topics of hookers, drugs and attempts to exploit money from in order to see one of the girls’ asses, somewhere in which the frightened woman who was being hit on managed to escape to another car.

Friday was a fairly typical night of Georgetown area socializing with Vicky, her housemates and her friends from her semester in Hungary. “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” was the definite highlight of the night and it provided essential lessons such as: 1) if your going to leave a dead old lady in front of the morgue in a box be sure to leave a nice note saying she died of natural causes and run her pockets for that money your mom left you for the summer 2) tweens should never buy diamond rings for their girlfriend and 3) the best way to clean dishes is to throw them off the roof and shoot them mid-air with a shotgun.

Saturday offered it’s own fun provided by a surprise visit by Stefan and Mary who, due to Stefan’s always busted ass phone, I had assumed had fallen into a well somewhere. One bottle of Riesling at Bilbo Baggin’s later I joined up with the G-Town kids for Bosnian food at a carryout around the corner from my house that previously had previously gone unnoticed to me. I didn’t even know my area had enough of an ex-pat community to sustain such a place though I’m glad to discover it as the food was excellent, the world cup was on, and there was a full-on European grocery attached. Goal number 1 achieved it was on to the second goal for the night, The Brickskeller. For those not familiar with the DC area, the Brick holds the Guinness World Record for the largest variety of beers served. The menu was easily a dozen pages long, categorized by country and held over 1,000 different beers ranging in price from $3.25 to $149.95. I’m still in awe and expect numerous visits in the near future as it’s my new life goal to complete a world conquest of beer.
Sunday was filled with the joy of waking up at 5:30 AM to drive my mother to the airport. A joy that was matched only by that of my Mother’s towards having to fly to Idaho to teach for a week. After that I made it up to Baltimore to try and entertain Tara in her new city and, though it was Sunday and we were broke so we mainly watched TV, it was exponentially more amusing to watch TV with other people. Her living situation is pretty fucking spectacular as she has a nicely sized apartment (right next to the monument) with exposed brick walls and a balcony. It also gave me a great excuse to not study for the statistics test that I would’ve failed anyway since we apparently learned everything on the single day of class I couldn’t attend due to my car trouble. Thus, I may in fact have to actually study for the remaining two tests in order to gain my C, a notion that displeases me greatly.

All in all it’s been a decent week. I still don’t have a job and my car is causing me all sorts of grief, but I’m finally enjoying being in DC for a summer. Now if only it would stop raining and the power would come back on, then I could finally stop using my cell phone as a flashlight.

The Six-Year Plan

"Gabriel Whitney says he did not plan to nearly suffocate President Bush in a bear hug. In fact, he did not plan to hug him at all. . . But after six years of undergraduate school and 4,872 demerits, Mr. Whitney, 25, of Nashua, N.H., could hardly restrain himself."

What Else Is New?

"Pamela Anderson is planning to strip naked in a shop window - for an anti-fur protest."
From femalefirst.co.uk, because Pamel Anderson getting naked is doing wonders for women around the globe. Perhaps if you're planning to do something outrageous (so as to, you know, cause an outrage), it shouldn't be the one thing you are famous for doing?

Reversible Destiny Lofts

"Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, whose moto is Architecture Against Death, unveiled a few months ago a small apartment complex in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka that is anything but comfortable and calming. 'People, particularly old people, shouldn't relax and sit back to help them decline,' Arakawa insists. 'They should be in an environment that stimulates their senses and invigorates their lives.'"

Please note for whom these lofts are dedicated to the memory of.

Call Me

"In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear. "

Yeah this sounds like a good idea, minus the whole, "hey jackass turn off your deafeningly pitched squeal" factor.

Nuclear Diplomacy

What a crazy week of news stories. A Chinese baby with three arms, a languishing debate still ongoing about the "stolen" 2004 presidential election, the eternal battle between sticks and carrots for Iran, and how could anyone forget about the looming Haditha saga?

Alright, I threw in the Chinese baby for good measure but I think it's just what we need these days, an little pinch of mutant baby in a world where US policy both domestic and international is facing a rough road ahead.

Iran, arguably at the necessary forefront of our international focus, poses an intriguing dilemma. With forces stretched to capacity as it is and opposition from Russia and China on the Security Council front, a diplomatic answer is exactly what the administration needs at this point. The very nature of the Iranian government (with behind the scenes power resting in the hands of the unelected Supreme Leader and Guardian Council) leads to problems of diplomatic relations as it's a consistent question of where the shots are being called from.

Matters are further complicated through the regime of Ahmadinejad who is currently attempting to increase the powers of the presidency (with the apparent backing of Ayatollah Khamenei), and thus views the propaganda gains of nuclear enrichment as a viable means of power consolidation.

A solution may not present itself from the option of direct talks between the US and Iran as the latter may likely be simply vying for time and the former may likely be going through the motions to appease the international community before pre-emptive strikes. What, in my mind, cannot be argued is the notion of a nuclear capable Iran is diametrically opposed to stability within the Middle East.

- adam

Things I Learned from Browsing Today's New York Times

Apparently it's no longer acceptable to hit on people at fitness clubs. Unlike the glory days of the 1980s in which only the prime hardbodies even thought about going to the gym and stayed for 3 hours just to chat, America's gyms are now filled with fatties and people actually care about physical health. LAAAAAAME. This guy says bring back the leotard thongs with flesh colored tights and throw in some dudes with crotch hugging shorts thrusting their manliness in the air for all to see. It's fitness dammit, and we all now that 90% of excercise is fashion and 10% is ennui filled desparaging of others while you stand smoking in the back of the room.

- adam