День четвертый

Sorry folks, I've had some shit going on that was keeping me from attending to revitalize this blog. So tonight i'm just going to keep it short and simple and we'll get back to the good stuff on friday.

Alright one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time is "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. If you haven't heard of this, you must look it up.

It is the frame of the canvas of the American landscape in the early sixties, not geographically, but of society and people. Jack Kerouac, a very famous beat writer, and his friend Neal Cassady (who was a member of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters), are broke to the bone in the metropolis on the coast and the book details their experiences of being hobo's living in cars and meeting with people like William Burroughs and Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsber and this massive years-long haze of drugs and alcohol and sex and god knows what. I study American history as hobby, and this book paints the perfect landscape of the various American societies that make us the "United" states. It is wild, it is fun, and best of all, it is true. Try looking at a library or online for the one that's subtitled "The Original Scroll". The original publication was highly edited and censored and nearly everything that the book presented was erased. in "The Original Scroll", they published the book literally word for word including grammatical and punctuational errors and all that, and keep all the names real (which the original publishers didn't allow) and adds like 200 pages of more story that was cut out by the original publisher.

 For music,  I'm listening to Simon and Garfunkel. I can't explain them. I do not know why they can do what they do. But I do know that their music is pure beauty and joy while at the same side truthful and sad and dark. the Sound of Silence is a fantastic song, as is Bridge over troubled water.


alright night peeps sorry i've just been totally fucking swamped but tomorrow night i promise!

dritten Tag

Good morning, afternoon, or evening my lovelies, whichever you prefer. As we enter the wee hours of the night my mind has a tendency to slip off the cycle of sanity and splash into the boiling bubbling pit of madness down below. Leave now, or forever hold your peace.

As we live in a completely flawed capitalist society, we are subject to its problems relating to the economy at all times. For one to be able to find a job at this current point in time is near impossible for anybody, including all those poor college students or recent graduates who're spending four years of their life, maybe more, to try to infiltrate an already over-saturated job market but the jobs simply aren't there. According to some sources only one in four college students is able to get a job pertaining to their field of study after graduation. The upper end of the job spectrum is overflowing due to an abundance of college graduates (the numbers have been increasing in multiples the past few years) and massive decrease of job availability. As a result graduates are unable to find a job in any market. The same is true for the lower end of the spectrum. With the recent massive influx of immigrants taking over the low-class jobs, nearly half the citizens, both uneducated and those with degrees, are forced to sit idly by without a steady income of any sort. We need to get this train back on its tracks but how? I myself haven't been able to think of anything that WE the people can do to help the situation. I mean we could cite FDR and all the reforms of that era that created millions of jobs and balanced out the national debt that sure as shit ain't going to work this time. OK sorry for all this bullshit ranting, like i said, my mind descends further into insanity as the night wears on.

Tonight's movie is Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. I'm sure that everyone here has heard of it at some point or another, and most have watched it.

Pan's Labyrinth is a beautiful film delving into our childish roots and the fantastical nature of dream, in the setting of World War II era Italy. The protagonist Ofelia is taken to her stepfather's house/villa to live in safety while the rest of the country is hard at war. Being isolated in the middle of nowhere and having nothing to do because of her step-father's hatred towards her, she starts making up her own friends and adventures as if it were some sort of lucid waking-dream state in a whole new world she imagines stays hidden form the rest of the adults. Her meeting with Pan, the legendary faun, leads her to discover that in this world she's created, she is the queen and that she must complete a few tasks before being able to return from the above-ground world and claim her throne. It sounds dull and boring but the film is so impassioned and sweet and shows the pure innocence of youth with Ofelia and the closed-minded corrupted fucked-uppedness of adulthood and war and politics through her stepfather and the setting of "real" world. Ofelia embarks on a number of quests to complete her goal, and on the way try to save her pregnant dying mother. In the end, things wrap in one of the saddest scenes that you'll ever see that depicts the terrible end of youth and childhood and how terrible everything else is. Rambling on again. Rent it, watch it online, whatever. You probably have already.

Tonight's musical album is Tommy by The Who

This is a revolutionary rock and roll album by one of the greatest musical groups of all time. The album is not a traditional record style program, it is a rock opera which means each song is a chapter in the overall story of the album. Tommy is about a young boy... Tommy... who suffers a tragedy at early childhood and ends up deaf, dumb and blind as a result. There is no way for me to describe what all this album gets into, but it's an interesting story but the best parts are the sound and the message portrayed through the music. Keith Moon's bombastic drumming smashing and hammering away at your head while Entwhistle eases you into the groove before suddenly busting out into a wild solo and shredding your face. The songs Tommy, Pinball Wizard, Sparks, and Underture are my particular favorites, and can be heard at sadsteve.com Though I will recommend that you listen to the whole album in its correct order to feel the full impact of what's going on. Do yourself a favor and listen to this epic album.

I'll be skipping the rest tonight folks, I'm just hellishly exhausted and today was already a fail. But stay tuned, there's gonna be some good shit tomorrow. Peace

Deuxième jour

Alas I can no longer resist to heed the call of my old broken swivel-chair and fingerprint-engraved frayed-cabled mouse. Having garnered a dedicated following of two readers I think it is high time I spew out some more nonsense to fill their heads.

Now living in Los Angeles we are subject to terrible traffic conditions, some of the worst in the world. The mention of the dreaded 405 during rush hour, which is pretty much every hour, is enough to push a seasoned driver to canceling some appointment or high school reunion. But our terrible traffic experiences are not solely due to the fact that we drive along the 405. The fearsome reputation of the interstate comes most from the absurd drivers we have here. Being the largest city in Southern California, we suffer the ill driving of fresh border-hopping folks who keep a cool 35 mph on the freeway to avoid the attention of la migra, and our excellent climate attracts senior citizens from all over the world who make for some seriously dangerous driving. Now there are those who choose to bring up arguments regarding race and gender as a factor for bad driving but I'm not going to point fingers at old women and Asians for their terrible road-habits. Sitting along in the fast lane at half the speed of the flow of traffic, these old fools are the cause for all our traffic woes. Just today, I was subjected to being a back-seat passenger in a vehicle driven by one of these aforementioned drivers, and oh how terrible it was indeed. The driver who shall for now go un-named somehow decided that they should keep to the carpool lane to "save gas." This whole gas-saving scheme also involved driving at no faster than forty-five miles per hour. A good six hundred or so fellow 405'ers honked, flashed, and otherwise complained at this absurd behavior. Even a god damn cop car gave us a shining with the spotlight. But i digress, none of this belongs on a blog.

During the above ordeal I chose to close my eyes and arrange myself in the airplane crash position and pipe in some awesome tunes on the headphones, you know, to help keep my mind off my impending death at the hands of a bad driver. Today's album is Aqualung by Jethro Tull.

Most folks aren't too familiar with Jethro Tull. They were a British rock band fronted by the infamous Ian Anderson, a genius madman flautist who resembled a homeless-genie-magician-pirate who stood on one leg to play the flout. That being said, the character on the cover of the album art is NOT Ian Anderson. That is a homeless man painted by Anderson's wife, who was the inspiration for the albums namesake song Aqualung (Listen Here). Jethro Tull's musical style is very unique, with some songs being a combination of folksy-guitar with fairy-tale rhyme lyrics that jump into thrashing electric guitar metal madness and hammered chords on an organ. They have often been called an experimental rock band, and if so they are likely the most successful of that genre. But Anderson claims there is nothing experimental about Tull's music. If you listen to the first few songs on the album, you get a good idea of the eclectic acoustic style of the group. The namesake song is about the homeless fellow painted on the album cover, who lives in a park and has snot dripping out of his nose, greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes, and has a particular perverted eye for female children. Sounds stupid and crazy, I know, but it's a fun song to listen to just for the sound if not for the absurd story being told. The second song called Cross-Eyed Mary (Listen Here) is a sequel to the first and offers some interesting social commentary on the part of the young children that our homeless man seems to dig. Another worthy mention on the album is Locomotive Breath. The links for the above songs are from the website Sad Steve which is an amazing resource for people looking for music. They have literally everything that was ever recorded for free streaming and download in an easy-to-use format. I think the site is owned and operated by a poor college student much like ourselves, so visit it often for good karma :)

Tonight's movie is The Royal Tenenbaums, a beautiful film directed by the great Wes Anderson and featuring an all-star cast of Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Andrew Wilson, Gene Hackman, Anjelica Houston, Danny Glover, and Bill Murray among others.

The movie tells the story of a has-been family of have-been people who've lost their stardom as the years went on. Gene Hackman plays Royal Tenenbaum, the father who was formerly a prominent litigator but has been recently residing permanently in a hotel and spying on his wife (Anjelica Houston). Their sons were child stars in their youth, with Luke Wilson as a child tennis prodigy and Ben Stiller as a brilliant child businessman and biological scientist or something of that nature. As with all of Wes Anderson's films, the characters are perfectly developed and we grow to love or hate them in the first moments they show up on screen. There is a seamless integration of musical soundtrack to these little amazing cinematographic moments Anderson has in all his films, like the scene where Gwyneth Paltrow's character (who's not particularly attractive in this film) simply steps out of a bus to greet her adopted brother, but coupled with the music and the camera the moment feels like a short beautiful touch of true perfection, whatever that means. I'm rambling. Watch the damn movie if you haven't already, its online everywhere.

I'll forgo the suggested literature and instead replace it with a comic series I just finished that I think is absolutely brilliant. Runaways, created and written by Brian K Vaughn and published by Marvel Comics takes place in our very own Los Angeles in a world where the superheroes we know like the X-Men and Avengers and Spiderman and all that shit are real. But they're not what this book is about. It tells the story of this group of seemingly normal teenagers who find out that their parents are secretly a group of mad supervillains who, for the most part, control the rest of the world. As the teens are hunted down by their parents to keep the secret from spreading, they each discover that they have inherited some superpowers from their parents. They vanquish their folks' evil organization and become the preeminent superhero crime-fighting organization on the West Coast, and that's only the first chapter of the story. Again, it sounds silly but it's really very fun, illustrating what it would be like as a teenage superhero with new-found powers in this urban setting we know and love. It's available free online for those who will take the time to look but otherwise just pop into your local bookstore and read it there and see if its something you'd be interested in buying and supporting.

Well I reckon that's it for tonight, gotta get back to my simultaneous reading of books and watching of films to keep this show on the road. FTP

Day 1

Welcome, my children, to my page about absolutely nothing. There's more of that to come in the following days but for now things will be kept simple.

Today's movie is Oldboy.

Its a Korean film about a man who is kidnapped and taken from his family and the madness that ensues when he gets out. Sounds cheesy but there's an epic fight scene involving a hammer and sixty bad guys and just all around brilliance. Read some reviews online and give it a shot, its on Netflix for streaming and there are various other illicit sources where one might be able to watch it if they were so inclined.

The album of the day is Meddle by Pink Floyd.

An amazing composition by easily one of the greatest bands of all time, this album contains one of the Floyd's quintessential songs, and one of my personal favorite songs Echoes. If you haven't heard it yet, it is on several other Pink Floyd albums in shorter versions but the original 23 minute version on Meddle is a brilliant acoustic epitome of psychedelic rock. The haunting piano blips and spine-chilling screeches that fill in the gaps between the amazing smash out lyrical parts CANNOT go unnoticed. Also recommended is A Pillow of Winds on the same album. Gotta love the names these guys come up with. Anyway, not that I'm condoning the use of psychotropic substances like marijuana (jk I really am), people have found Echoes to be a devastatingly intense mind trip, in a good way. Kinda like Time, but we'll leave that for another week.

The Book of the Week is "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke. If you don't know who Clarke is, he essentially wrote our future. The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and various other milestone science fiction books, he started off as a astrophysicist and invented the concept of the transmission satellite. So all that Dish and DirecTV shit that y'all enjoy, that wouldn't be around without this guy. The entire backup support system for the world governments can be attributed to Clarke's ideas about data-transmitting satellites in orbit around the earth. Now getting into his good stuff like 2001 takes a little bit of time, one needs to be quite the avid reader but doesn't need some sort of rocket-science background and it gets pretty deep pretty f'ing quick. So a good step in the right direction is "Childhood's End." Contrary to what the title suggests, the book is not for children, about children, or from the point of view of children. It is the future and humans have stopped reproducing a-la Children of Men but the kids aren't dying quite yet. There is still a full generation of children, but the adults from who's perspective the reader observes the world witness that the "benefactors" or "creators" of the human race decide that humanity so far has fucked up way too bad, and they come back and brainwash the generation of children in order to take them away and create a new, better human race on some other world. Now we're not talking about turning them into children of the corn shit, but it is much more directly subtle but quite horrifying once you attribute what's going on with reality and see the parallels of society in Clarke's fictional earth and those of our very own home planet. Check it out at your local library, go to a bookstore, you can read it in an hour or two, its not long at all, and its just a good damn book. It really makes you think.

Now that's all I got the time for right now, tune in tomorrow night or whenever for some more bizarre madness. Peace loves