1. I just saw a commercial for Rush Hour 3 that ended with the voiceover guy saying "directed by Brett Ratner." What? Don't most people who are into movies enough to know directors other than Spielberg and Ron Howard know that Brett Ratner is cinematic poison? Didn't they see Red Dragon? Or *shudder* Money Talks? Weird.
2. I was wondering last night whether Charles Nelson Reilly was dead or not. I suspected he was, but didn't really think so. So I remembered to look it up tonight, and apparently he died in May! WHAT THE HELL! How did I not hear about that? Is my sense of how big a celebrity he was warped by all those Match Game reruns I used to watch, and therefore nobody actually covered his death? Man, that kind of sucks. I liked him.
3. Celebrity deaths come in threes, as everybody knows, but do they usually come within a day of each other? Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder, and Bill Walsh all died today or yesterday. If this had happened during the 1970s, it would have been a lot bigger news. I'm not sure most people remember who any of those guys are (or knew in the first place). I'm not looking forward to reading a bunch of obituaries that have to explain why we should care about who Ingmar Bergman was, and that he wasn't actually Ingrid Bergman (who was female, and died in 1982). Or hearing about how Bill Walsh invented the "West Coast Offense." Or seeing Philadelphia news stations pay tribute to Tom Snyder, the most famous Philly news man ever (on a short list just ahead of Larry Kane).
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
is it training camp time already?
I don't know what to make of the fact that this is the second time within recent memory that I've passed along a video of people making "hand fart" music, but I wanted to share it with you because this is basically what goes through my head any time my brain is idle between September and January (but hardly ever February, god damn it).
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
a chest-unloading rant about the dumbest crap in the world
Uuuuuuuuuuuugh.
Lindsay Lohan, please go away.
Seriously.
I don't want to go on a stupid rant, although I'm probably going to anyway. Just go away. Don't ever let me see you again. I don't want to hear about your addictions, your using rehab and (supposed) redemption as a way to further your career, and then the subsequent relapses. I'm sick of it. I don't want to hear about your apparent near-illiteracy, hilarious though it may be. I damn sure don't want to see you in any movies.
Basically, I'm not entirely convinced that Lindsay Lohan is a real person. I haven't seen her portrayed that way anywhere. If she is a real person, and not a media creation to sell trashy magazines and provoke blogging dorks into incoherent diatribes, I doubt she sees herself as a real person, or if she does, she doesn't see the world as a real place. The whole thing is just so cliched that I can't even laugh anymore. She's the ultimate symbol of the 21st century: a vacuous nobody propped up to make us feel superior to somebody, whom we despise even as we can't look away, as she spirals down toward her inevitable tragedy with ever-increasing speed.
And at the center of it all is a poor, deluded girl who, like so many people in the world, learned to treat her problems with booze and drugs (I'm one to talk, right?), and is rewarded with the attention that she so desperately craves. So her ankle monitor becomes a fashion accessory, and, by extension, a mockery of the entire concept of self-betterment. And she lands in headlines for her stint in rehab, and two weeks later for a cocaine-related arrest.
Ugh. I'm tired of it. Doooooooone with it.
Lindsay Lohan, please go away.
Seriously.
I don't want to go on a stupid rant, although I'm probably going to anyway. Just go away. Don't ever let me see you again. I don't want to hear about your addictions, your using rehab and (supposed) redemption as a way to further your career, and then the subsequent relapses. I'm sick of it. I don't want to hear about your apparent near-illiteracy, hilarious though it may be. I damn sure don't want to see you in any movies.
Basically, I'm not entirely convinced that Lindsay Lohan is a real person. I haven't seen her portrayed that way anywhere. If she is a real person, and not a media creation to sell trashy magazines and provoke blogging dorks into incoherent diatribes, I doubt she sees herself as a real person, or if she does, she doesn't see the world as a real place. The whole thing is just so cliched that I can't even laugh anymore. She's the ultimate symbol of the 21st century: a vacuous nobody propped up to make us feel superior to somebody, whom we despise even as we can't look away, as she spirals down toward her inevitable tragedy with ever-increasing speed.
And at the center of it all is a poor, deluded girl who, like so many people in the world, learned to treat her problems with booze and drugs (I'm one to talk, right?), and is rewarded with the attention that she so desperately craves. So her ankle monitor becomes a fashion accessory, and, by extension, a mockery of the entire concept of self-betterment. And she lands in headlines for her stint in rehab, and two weeks later for a cocaine-related arrest.
Ugh. I'm tired of it. Doooooooone with it.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Larkin Grimm went (more) insane or something
Long time readers (if there are any left) of this here corner o' the ol' Internet may remember that I have had kind words in the past for neo-hippie/cosmic freakout virtuoso Larkin Grimm. I kind of forgot about her for awhile, listened to her new album last year a handful of times but didn't really get real into it, and recently was looking through the list of my friends on MySpace (yeah, yeah, shut up) and clicked on her page. Here's what she's saying about her new stuff:
"Most of my recent music deals with acoustic and psychoacoustic properties of sound. In performances, I like to gradually fill a room with sounds that interfere with one another in the air. Each sound on its own is steady and flat, but when several of these sounds collide, they produce rippling rhythmic patterns, resultant psychoacoustic frequencies, and fluctuations in air pressure that can be sensed physically in space. These sounds come out of loudspeakers in the form of electronic feedback, and directly from my body in the form of throat singing and long violin drones. With this activity I attempt to merge my bodily, acoustic presence with amplified electronic sound, to create a third sound that is happening entirely within the air of the performance space."
I don't think "psychoacoustic" is a word that actually exists, but maaaaaan I bet that's really freaking cool. Or irritating. Or cool for me and irritating for most people. Larkin! Come back to Philly! There's no way that stuff sounds half as good recorded as it probably does live.
"Most of my recent music deals with acoustic and psychoacoustic properties of sound. In performances, I like to gradually fill a room with sounds that interfere with one another in the air. Each sound on its own is steady and flat, but when several of these sounds collide, they produce rippling rhythmic patterns, resultant psychoacoustic frequencies, and fluctuations in air pressure that can be sensed physically in space. These sounds come out of loudspeakers in the form of electronic feedback, and directly from my body in the form of throat singing and long violin drones. With this activity I attempt to merge my bodily, acoustic presence with amplified electronic sound, to create a third sound that is happening entirely within the air of the performance space."
I don't think "psychoacoustic" is a word that actually exists, but maaaaaan I bet that's really freaking cool. Or irritating. Or cool for me and irritating for most people. Larkin! Come back to Philly! There's no way that stuff sounds half as good recorded as it probably does live.
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