Archive for January, 2011
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Ah. The Old Triple Trumpet Trombone Tap Dancing Trick
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 11, 2011 by admin in Music
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011The multi-talented Gunhild Carling and the Carling Family seem to be keeping big band and vaudeville alive. I don’t speak Swedish, but thanks to Google Translate I can assure you that they provide “hours of musical binge”.
Ages ago, we answered the question we knew had been gnawing at your mind for ages, i.e.: What Has 14 Legs, 30 Strings, Bad Teeth, and No Soul? Now we’re here to answer another of life’s burning questions: What has three trumpets, a megaphone, a set of bagpipes, a clarinet, a trombone, a blues harp, tap dances, sings jazz standards, tells jokes, speaks Swedish, and can balance a trumpet on its nose while it plays upright bass? Well, actually “it” is a “she”, and her name is Gunhild Carling. I must admit I was left with a strange mixture of admiration and sympathy when I saw this video compilation of just a few of Carling’s talents. My first reaction was “wow, that’s what they mean by multi-talented instrumentalist”, then I was like “wow, but does the world really need a person who can play three trumpets at once?” and then I was like “Aw jeez, I bet the poor thing had one of those miserable showbiz childhoods like Michael Jackson” and then I was like “Ugh. What a tragicomic display of a bizarre desperation to please or impress”. But in the end, I got a grip, stopped psychoanalyzing and prefacing my personal observations with the word “like”, and realized that Gunhild Carling and her family are just fun-loving and talented in the old-school style of vaudeville, jazz, and other ages-old forms of traveling theater. Watching the video clips of Carling is probably a lot less fun than the live show must be; I think this would be a fantastically fun evening of live entertainment. If you don’t enjoy the clips, and you don’t speak Swedish, be sure to at least Google Translate her website for a magical poetry treat that still probably conveys the vibe of a Carling Family show. An example: “Hours of musical binge! Love-game makes people happy. Car-spawn, as an artist family Carling offering, pulling together. The difference is that the Carlingford-game all the time is packed with humor. And it is not always what love succeed.” Hours of musical binge indeed. Check out some vids below. Much more fun – and much less opportunistic – than slowing down to look at car crashes. Read the rest of this entry »
Fight Clubliminal – Revisiting The Subliminal Elements Of Fight Club
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 10, 2011 by admin in Popular Media
Monday, January 10th, 2011People are always asking me if I know Marla Singer…
[Please note: spoilers ahead] People are always asking me if I know Marla Singer. And although I have to say I don’t think she’s Jack’s Vagina, I have to say yeah, I know Marla Singer, she’s Jack’s anima in Fight Club
To me, the best popular media – whether it’s music, film, or literature – possesses a gratifying story or message, but manages to layer metaphors, symbols, or otherwise express ambiguity that makes the creation rewarding on repeated consumption. And Fight Club does a fantastic job of this, with its more obvious exploration of consumer culture and nihilism, and its deeper exploration of the struggle for romance and personal identity in modern life, where most of us are “voyeurs of material wealth”. This film has been analyzed to death, so I’m only going to touch on one thing here, something that gets discussed occasionally, but is usually either dismissed out of hand, or rabidly defended by those who believe it’s “true”: The idea that Helena Bonham Carter’s character Marla Singer is just another projection of Ed Norton’s “Jack” character. I like this idea, and think it brings an interesting and different meaning to the film. Although it’s easy to find references to David Fincher’s explanation of the early subliminal cuts of Tyler Durden (they’re just meant to foreshadow Tyler’s later appearance), as far as I know, he’s never been asked why, for instance, Marla can get away with smoking heavily both at meetings for a Tuberculosis support group and a meeting for men with testicular cancer. I’ve also always found it worthy of note that Tyler, Marla, and “Jack” are never in the same scene, except one extremely brief moment in Tyler’s bedroom.
Although the film diverges from the book in ways, author Chuck Palahniuk
Quality of Life vs Quantity of Life
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 9, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, January 9th, 2011Do we really need a growth economy fueled by planned obsolescence? Or are we ready to start living better, rather than living bigger?
I’m no stranger to the emotionally dynamic world of new consumer products. We all know the feelings evoked when you decide you need a new camera, car, washing machine, or lawn mower, and start researching all the shiny new options and exciting innovations. You make your purchase, and there’s a palpable emotion being experienced as the money changes hands. A sense of achievement and ownership, and a childish excitement about getting your new toy home and opening the package, revealing its shiny pristine contents. Somewhere in the checkout process, you may experience a little buzzkill when the salesperson suggests you’d be foolish to not buy the extended service contract. But you’re a smart person. You opt not to buy it. You know they do testing with advanced algorithms that determine the EXACT DAY the product will fail, which will always be approximately 23 days after the the warranty expires. I jest a bit, but it’s well-established that most service contracts aren’t worth it, and for electronics stores, are one of their greatest sources of revenue, with margins that are nearly 18 times the margin on the goods themselves. So in any case, you get your new purchase home, and if you made smart decisions and spent enough money, you may actually be happy with the product for a while. With the emphasis on “a while”; odds are, especially if it’s an electronic device, there’s a store built right into your purchase, imploring you to buy more. Your mobile phone or computer suddenly needs apps and services you’d never dreamed of being essential to life itself until you started using it, and while a company like Apple makes very little on the sale of apps in these little built in shopping malls, they drive device sales, and a $200 iPod was only costing them 4 bucks each to produce once production was ramped up. The fact is, any buyers’ remorse you feel is the least of your worries, because your new toy will probably be your old toy within a year. Not because it suddenly doesn’t do exactly what you meant it to do, but because the maker has built in a dirty trick with some form of planned obsolescence. In the case of computers, this used to take the form of the Wintel duopoly (a partnership soon to be made obsolete itself by quadroid), in which Microsoft’s code bloat required ever more powerful processors from Intel, driving innovation that was arguably unnecessary otherwise. Does your desktop computer do anything it didn’t do five years ago? Probably not, unless you’re editing HD movies or crunching meteorological data in your home office. Other forms of obsolescence will come from products that failed from shoddy outsourced manufacturing, or in the case of the US obsession with SUV’s, a backtracking in fuel efficiency that makes vehicles more expensive to operate than they need to be, driving anxiety over peak oil, which leads to things like the BP gulf spill, as oil companies get careless in their pursuit of locating oil and maximizing margins. Lately I regularly question the current American model of capitalism, in which corporations have more rights than humans, it’s possible for 4 people to have more wealth than the world’s 57 poorest countries, and in America itself, the pie is divided in such a way that out of every hundred dollars, one person has 42 bucks, while most of the rest of us have about 9 cents each. Although you can find lengthy explanations both emotionally opposing and intellectually defending planned obsolescence as an underpinning of successful market-driven societies, I personally think we’ve entered a new paradigm, and with the world’s population growth slowing to a plateau where we will have seven billion people on the planet this year, it may be time to think about what we really need to live well, rather than what we need to do to keep fueling economic growth. Aside from individual greed, the only justification for growth-driven capitalism has been the fear of some Malthusian catastrophe, something that is an absurd projection in era when we produce so much food and technological innovation that we don’t know what to with either. What about you, have you had enough? Or do you still want more? Read the rest of this entry »
Sarah Palin’s Political Hyperbole In The Crosshairs
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 8, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, January 8th, 2011We don’t know yet if Sarah Palin’s political hit list inspired Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords, but we do know that the only thing more full of logical fallacy than a Sarah Palin speech is the deranged ramblings of Loughner’s YouTube posts.
Okay liberals. Put on your indoor voices and your thinking caps. Sarah Palin did not issue orders for Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona today by putting Gifford’s name in the cross-hairs on her political hit list. If you take that stance, you’re resorting to the same deranged logical fallacies that both Loughner and Palin rely on; in Loughner’s case to presumably later justify his violent actions, in Palin’s case, to further her self-obsessed and delusional pursuit of political credibility. And don’t go getting all excited about how this is the end of Palin’s career; my only hope in the midst of this tragic event was that it might put a damper on the retarded and infantile rhetoric that infects American politics, and those hopes are quickly being dashed. If you look at both conservative and liberal blogs and their commenters today, you see the same old debates, only escalated to new levels. We don’t yet – and may never – know what Loughner’s motivation was, but it seems safe to say that in the current environment of irrationally polarized debate fueled by prominent figures like Palin calling for executions without trial , using rifle crosshairs to identify political opponents, and constantly posing with guns while fomenting rebellion, you’re going to see more events like the one that occurred today in Arizona. Unfortunately, that’s not what anyone’s talking about so far. Liberals are pointing fingers and creating direct causal connections where there are none, and tea party conservatives are rising in passionate defense of Palin. The weirdest of these two lots can be found on Palin’s Facebook page, where literally thousands of comments were posted today, with an alarming number of her supporters referring to her as “my Sarah”. No joke. If you haven’t taken the time to learn a little about Jared Lee Loughner, take a look at his YouTube account . Which links to another account which is probably also his. There are three videos with text and background music. They all utilize peculiar logical fallacies to talk about “controlling your currency”, the government “controlling grammar”, and weird rambling definitions of terrorism and brainwashing. He often refers to himself in the second person and the past tense, and makes very little useful sense. We’ve included the videos below, with a transcript from the first one, and his reading list, which is fairly predictable for a brainwashed, “Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory
It’s Amazing How Much I Have In Common With John Boehner
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 7, 2011 by admin in Politics
Friday, January 7th, 2011I’ve also decided that my ignorance of congressional procedure makes my destiny clear: a career in congress.
 Much like Pete Sessions and Mike Fitzpatrick, I also enjoy swearing at the TV. |
It’s amazing how much I have in common with Republicans, and John Boehner in particular. Regarding both, I’m happy to see Nancy Pelosi leave her position as Speaker of the House. I might be happier if she weren’t still hanging around as Minority Leader, but baby steps, right? Baby steps. Some other things I have in common with Republicans are that I don’t understand the Constitution well enough to read it properly in congress, I love it when people give me money, and I sometimes miss important appointments. Although I feel confident that if I’d just been elected to the house of representatives, I’d at least make it to my swearing in. Unless of course, I was busy raking in cash from supporters, and there was something great on TV. Like my swearing in ceremony, for instance (starring John Boehner), or some drunk, fellow politician crying on TV (also starring John Boehner). Speaking of ol’ John, aside from the fact that spell-check doesn’t suggest “boner” and “bonehead” to replace my last name, I have even more things in common with him in particular, as I mentioned at the outset. Historically I’ve been known to drink quite a bit, although not so much that people set up blogs about it, as in John’s case. This would lead to the occasional public tear in the eye, but again, not so often that people set up blogs about it. I’m also a little ashamed to admit that I still smoke. But at least I don’t smoke crappy brands like his, and promise sick friends I’ll quit if they will. But enough picking on John. Someday I may find myself sitting on the “Boehner Bench”. Another thing I recently discovered that I have in common with politicians is that I like getting paid to talk, even if nothing of benefit to the human race comes of it. After watching an hour of a house session the other day, I was reminded that politicians long ago made this a high art. Once I finally woke up, with drool on my face and a perfect imprint of my computer keyboard on my face, I went on Facebook and shared “I just listened to an hour of live house proceedings and can’t help wondering what makes anybody think the clowns in DC who’ve run our economy into the ground have any idea how to run a vacuum cleaner let alone an entity governing 300 million people”, adding that we’d all take a lot more interest in lawmaking if all legislation was decided by cagefighting matches. There was a lot of agreement on this topic amongst my fellow citizens. A friend chimed in, suggesting “it would have been cool if Nancy Pelosi ran over to Joe Wilson during the State of the Union address and tried to choke slam him”. Unfortunately, politics in America will never be this much fun, as we’ve pointed out before (except maybe when Pelosi hands over the gavel, see below) But in spite of the boring future that may await me, I’ve made a big decision. Given my ignorance of the Constitution and legislative procedure, my dual passions for blowing smoke, and the fact that I like free lunches where people give me money, my destiny is clear. I’m running for the US Senate.
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