Wednesday, November 29, 2006
One habit I wish I could quit is my political news addiction. At minimum I usually read The New York Times and The Huffington Post every morning and check back throughout the day. I think this addiction has as much to do with an interest in controversy and drama as it does with being informed. Because really, beyond being able to impress my fellow Los Angelenos at cocktail parties with all this stuff they've never heard before, it's pretty much useless information that only looks and sounds like something meaningful. I mean, I was delighted to read that today Bill Frist announced that he wouldn't bother trying to run for the white house, but that cat killer was never electable in the first place, so who cares?
But every now and
then I stumble onto some piece of writing that is so right on, so well
done and clear and concise and true, that it just sort of brightens my
day and makes me feel a little, I don't know, better about our capacity
to overcome evil. The following is by a poster named "Snowball"
responding to a short blog item that asks, Are
You Psychotic? Because Empirically That Makes You Susceptible To Being
A Republican...
Conservatism, and its ideological cousin Libertarianism, also provide ideological frameworks that rationalize pathological behavior such as the lack of empathy, narcisism, paranoia and delusions of grandeur. Conservatives tend to dismiss and feel threatened by the achievements and hard work of others and amplify their own. We saw this in Republican campaigns against Democratic veterans such as Kerry, Webb, Hackett, Duckworth and others. By and large, Conservatives identified more heavily with non-veterans despite their "support the troops" rhetoric. Conservatives feel more comfortable with those whose existence does not challenge their own perceptions of themselves as hard working people who deserve their inhereted wealth or status. In the Conservative worldview, the value of labor is denied in favor of capital. Thus we have the greed is good mantra of the Objectivists.
Conservatism also provides a smokescreen for real or perceived deviance. Thus we have the numerous examples of Conservative firebrands who are later found out to engage in the same behaviors that they rail against. From gay pastors, priests and Republican politicians who condemn homosexuality to pederasts and adulterers who grandstand against the sins of the flesh, crooks who grandstand on law and order and drug addicts that grandstand against recreational drug use there is no shortage of cases where Conservatism is used to obfuscate internal conflicts brought about by guilt, to avoid self-reflection or discovery. Conservatism also has a built in psychological mechanism as a path out of their internal conflicts through the idea that "we are all sinners" and the act of redemption.
Thursday,
November 9, 2006
I saw Borat last night. My friend Mathias acquired a tape of The Ali G Show in 2000, back when it was still just a BBC thing, and we've been die hard
fans ever since. Needless to say, it can get annoying when something you've
been enjoying for so long suddenly becomes so thoroughly overhyped. Mathias
came back from opening night saying the movie was a "piece of shit,"
but I was determined to wait just long enough for the mania to subside
and then go enjoy myself. Well, between now and when the movie was released,
the Dems took back the night and warlord Rumsfield fell on his sword.
Suddenly Borat wasn't such a big deal.
No doubt Sacha Baron Cohen is the most gifted comedic actor working today. He's taken a simple idea
coined by Tom Green and turned it into a revolutionary-but-inevitable
synthesis of fiction and reality. This movie is far from the "funniest
movie ever made" as it's been marketed; it doesn't represent the
high watermark of anything -- but rather it's the first major work of
a new paradigm that, for better and worse, is going to grow into its own
proper genre, similar to the way Survivor changed television.
Fucking 21st century.
There were a couple of things keeping me from enjoying Borat more than I did. For one thing, it makes no sense. The fact that Borat
never seems to learn anything from his experiences on the show never bothered
me before, but here it did. Love him or hate him, you will probably never
want to see the Borat character again after seeing this movie. Of course
he doesn't change one bit over the course of this lame excuse for a story
that has him going to California in order to try to have sex with Pamela
Anderson.
I got tired of trying to figure out who was a plant, ie an actor meant
to pretend to be a "real person." There are a lot of them and
they're not cool. The irritating, repeated jumps between DV and HD video,
however, provide some clues. All in all, I might have preferred a clearer
partition between reality and staged scenes, ala Crocodile Hunter:
Collision Course.
I'm adding myself to the small list of people who don't approve of all
of Cohen's choices of targets. I really only want to laugh at bad people.
Whenever good-hearted or disempowered people become a target of Borat's
pranking, it calls the entire enterprise into question.
The film is at its best in its two most dangerous moments, both involving
large crowds of southerners, first when he mangles the national anthem
at a rodeo, and later at a fundamentalist revival. He's talking about
a country where millions of people would like to reinstate slavery. This
movie shows off true liberal rage. There's something so perfect about
its release coinciding with the Democrats taking back Congress. I believe
the scene in which Borat allows himself to be "saved" by a posse
of televangeical types will turn thousands of young people off of religion.
It's interesting to note that Cohen recently signed a very lucrative deal
to bring his third (string) character, the gay Austrian fashion reporter
Bruno, to the screen. If he goes as far with that character in the south
as he does with Borat, he'll get himself killed.
The joke that there seems to be a naive, primitive homoeroticism going
on in Borat's part of the world is made repeatedly. There's a scene early
on in the movie where Azamat, Borat's grossly fat producer and all round
sidekick, is seen applying baby powder, or something to that effect, to
Borat's privates. We learn things about Borat we would rather not know;
the joke is on the audience. The similarly amusing-but-disappointing Ali
G Indahouse also rethought its TV character in theretofore unseen
tropes of repeated sexual humiliation, latent homosexuality, and graphic
scatology. Borat's already infamous "nude wrestling"
scene is very, very funny, but it also makes me very afraid of finding
out what our entertainers will be doing for laughs five years from now.
Postscript: Just jump to about the 5:20 mark in this silly little prank on Cohen / Borat and see what happens when someone tries to lay a put on on the master of put ons...
Tuesday,
October 31, 2006
A couple of Halloween recommendations... A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is a unique, powerful, very personal and weird movie, gorgeous to look at and seething with life, like Kids with a heart. I'm personally turned off by the idea of any movie about tough people in any part of New York, but this is great. The only two people in Saints who don't entirely convince are Robert Downey Jr. and Chazz Palminteri, who look mannered next to the mostly unknown rest of the players.
Mutual
Appreciation does it without drama or professional actors, and
has a 100% approval rating at rotten tomatoes, a dubious website but a
rare feat. Practically every critic, it seems, recommends this movie.
Alas, we live in an age where the experts are treated with suspicion or
altogether ignored. Vote with your dollar for a smarter society and see
this movie.
I
recently dug up a record in Boston called Songs From Down the Hall by Kevin Vicalvi with Denis De La Gorgerdiere. It's from 1974 Worcester Mass. Along with
Bobb Trimble and Clearing, this record has started to make me more conscious
of my home state's musical heritage as being something to be proud of.
I want to trade for records like this. Vicalvi still has copies of the
original vinyl of this record for a reasonable price, as well as CDs with
bonus tracks. Do not miss this album, it's
a masterpiece.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
For everyone interested in unusual records, please let me direct your attention to a new page devoted to the very cool Speckled Ax EP by Paul Dasken. I found this killer item in 2003 and have been looking for Dasken ever since. In the end he found me when he googled his name and saw it featured on this site. He has a couple original copies left and let me deal with distributing them. You can read about it and listen to it here.
Monday, September 11, 2006
I observed 9/11 by watching Loose Change, which I'd never seen before. I've been fully convinced of 9/11 foul play ever since at least mid-2003, when I saw a dvd called Painful Deception -- a movie I strongly recommend if for no other reason than its charmingly ghetto use of powerpoint. I'd been warned off of Loose Change by a friend who had to review every 9/11 conspiracy movie for Hustler, primarily because it was said to be derivative of better works like the ponderously scientific Deception. Well, I guess they spruced up the movie I saw today, the 'second edition,' because it's quite a remarkable compendium of evidence. Most powerful is the extensive use of actual news coverage to go out on the air that day, most of which I'd never seen -- multiple eyewitnesses in the heat of the moment directly contradicting the official story that would soon emerge.
I don't know what happened on September 11th any more than I know who killed JFK, but I can confidently say that anyone who still thinks Oswald acted alone is obviously retarded. You may not like my way of saying this but do you believe the Warren Report or know anyone who does? I'll go one further and say that history will judge us as fools for believing the bizarre, way-stranger-than-fiction story of 9/11. It's as clear as day to anyone who has the emotional capacity to consider the evidence that various parties in big business and the government had foreknowledge of the event, and this means that what happened on 9/11 is not a conspiracy theory, but simply, a conspiracy. You don't have to be able to answer every unanswered -- and possibly unanswerable -- question to know intuitively that we have been lied to and that we must get to the truth if we're ever going to undo the massive damage done to our collective integrity in the past five years.
It's really lame that I have to write these words at all, but at this point most of the people I know agree with me on this and yet it's still pretty verboten to say it out loud, in mixed company or on the record. It's time to spread the word -- make your parents watch this movie, and show it to anyone over the age of 12. Stop being so scared. What are you afraid of? Anthrax? Let everyone know it's time to call bullshit on the biggest lie of them all.
Further reading: http://911research.wtc7.net
Postscript: David
Lynch agrees, something is very fishy.
In other news I'm back in LA in a great new place, and it seems like my life is starting over (in a good way). More later.
Tuesday,
July 4, 2006
In the tradition of the classic 2004 Mix By Douglas and Road Apples 2005 I present The Older and Wiser 2006 Mix. It's mostly a lot of psychedelic should-have-been classic rock with a few folk touches and a new age banger to wrap things up. Not the most adventuresome set ever but I think it's all strength no filler. Download, drop the files in itunes and burn a disk, print out the covers (courtesy Sara) and you're good to go. (No longer available, sorry.)
Also, please check out my brother Jack's new art website. Jack is a tremendously talented artist so please take a look and write to him with your comments.
Monday, June 12, 2006
So we moved out of our house in mid city and I'm spending the summer in Boston, hanging out with my family, working on a new screenplay, and seriously digging for records in my home state for the first time. I'm helping my mom get rid of junk, fixing technical issues (which mostly means convincing my parents to switch to macintosh computers and setting them up), and generally taking it easy for the first time in a long time. I was very sad to leave Herbquarters and it's the end of an era and the start of a new one.
So much stuff has happened since the last time I wrote it's hard to know where to start, but basically I've been doing a lot of cleaning. I didn't drink for six weeks and I've got a new consciousness about avoiding self-destructive habits. Did a six day master cleanse fast and that was rad -- would have kept it going but I just had too much to do and it's more or less impossible to be decisive and get things done in that state. I had a huge ebay record sale and put everything else in storage.
The news these days makes me hopeful that the republican nightmare may finally be coming to an end. It seems like the chickens are finally coming home to roost.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
After filing for an extension and working on the most recent little screenwritng job, I finally got around to posting two items close to my heart. The first is the awful truth about Radioactive Records. The short version is that they're thieves and you should boycott their products and tell your local store to stop buying from these bastards. The longer version is here. The second, happier update to the site is a page devoted to Collie Ryan. If you've been looking for her incredible records, look no further.
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Friday night Sara
took me to see Terry Riley at Getty Center as part of the Minimalist Jukebox
series. It was an odd selection of music and not what I would have programmed,
but then if I really had my way it would be one of those fabled all night
outdoor concerts, and psychedelics and naked dancing would be involved.
The scene at the Getty was a little more refined than that, but a couple
people let their freak flags fly, not the least of them Mr. Riley himself.
The first half of the show consisted of a string trio and quartet performed
by the Calder Quartet. It was that sort of academic early 60s work from
before Riley found his true voice. It was very well-performed however
and violinist Benjamin Jacobson is such a character I want to put him
in a buddy or brother pic with this unidentified record collector guy
from the movie Vinyl. (If anyone knows his name can you please
tell me?)
After a short intermission Terry Riley took the stage, dressed in what I'm guessing are his signature duds, a kufi and khaki safari suit, with a long white beard and glasses. He looked like Santa Claus' more interesting twin brother, pressed his hands together and bowed with that enigmatic buddha's grin I have only seen a couple of times. He performed one of his earlier Keyboard Studies and then "updated" it with some improvising noodlings that sounded suspiciously like seafood restaurant jazz, eliciting polite grins from the audience. For his own part Terry just smiled afterward and said he had taken "a couple left turns, not all of them intentional." Then came the highlight of the evening (besides just being in the presence of this Godhead artist). Terry left his handsfree microphone on and did a piece called Night Raga. I can only describe the jarring effect to being a guest in uncle Terry's house and coming downstairs early in the morning, jetlagged and woken up by what sounds like an esoteric musical prayer you possibly should not be seeing. It seemed like something private and I'm grateful I got to share it.
Then we went home and had a party screening of our new movie Go Ask Murray, a short documentary of a record shopping adventure and a smashing success. Along with the little writing job I picked up that morning, it was a pretty good day.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Wanna understand what the whole "hippie folk" thing I'm always going on about? Check out the excellent Ladies of the Canyon compilation by my friends at Numero Group out of Chicago, which I'm proud to say I helped with just a little. The production on this CD is as nice as any I've ever seen, and the music is pure bliss. In related news, I just received some more copies of Collie Ryan's three records, so please get in touch if you need a set. Right now I'm listening to some of Ms. Ryan's unreleased music... It's good.
Entries from other years are here: 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005
