Via NeoGAF's Johan van Benderschlotten:
"It's ok that you people have bad taste in music. The world requires lots of you to go around and perpetuate the shitty dynamic that the RIAA covets. Feel good about yourselves and pat your collective back tonight."
Part of the joy of buying the new Decemberists album after listening to the leak for a month is finding out what Mr. Meloy is actually saying. Like, finding out that your favorite song is actually about a rape.
Come and see!
Dear Amazon,
Do you understand what the word "shipped" actually means? See, I don't think you do. Apparently, when you say "shipped", you actually meant "I told the mail carrier to pick up a package". That doesn't not mean shipped. Shipped is the past tense of ship, and to ship means the package has moved away from the warehouse. Shipped means the fracking package has made its fracking way out the door and is on it's merry way to my doorstep. By definition, a package cannot have shipped and at the same time still be sitting on a dock somewhere waiting for the mail truck. It's one or the other.
At the same time, don't tell me a package has shipped 30 seconds after I ordered if if I ordered it at 9:00PM on a Saturday night. Then I know you're lying immediately. At least allow me to enjoy the illusion that my package has actually shipped.
One of my all-time favorite quotes...Jacob Bronowski captures in just a few minutes what I could take a lifetime to explain.
From the Knowledge or Certainty episode of The Ascent of Man.
You may recall that way back in February (my how time flies) I posted a list of 27 albums (I said 28 at the time, but miscounted) I had purchased because I had previously downloaded them from the Internet.
Here's 15 more albums I've purchased since then:
A.C Newman - The Slow Wonder
Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country
The Decemberists - The Tain
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
The Flaming Lips - At War With the Mystics
Mission of Burma - The Obliterati
Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Neko Case - Blacklisted
Neko Case - The Tigers Have Spoken
The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic
The New Pornographers - Electric Version
The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
Rilo Kiley - The Execution of All Things
Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
TV On The Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
That brings the grand total to 42 albums I've legitimately purchased (i.e. bought the disc from a real store; no AllofMP3 nonsense here) simply because I downloaded them first and liked what I heard. Oh the horrors of file sharing.
I have a suspicion that within a few weeks I'll be adding The Crane Wife, Knives Don't Have Your Back, one or more Laura Veirs albums (Carbon Glacier and Year of Meteors), and perhaps that old classic Tarkus to this list.
Today, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, was for me, a very confusing, conflicted day of reflection. Part of that was watching Keith Olberman. He played clips of Cheney lying on Meet the Press and Russert catching him. He played Matt Lauer confronting the President this morning on the torture issue...In the Oval Office.
The press is beginning to wake up from the slumber it's been in for all of these years.
Then I watched the conclusion of The Path to 9/11 on ABC.
I will say this about the movie: There were undeniably parts of it that were pure bullshit. There was clearly an attempt to make the Clinton Administration look more at fault than the Bush Administration. But, with that said, it was riveting television and was very well filmed.
In the middle of the 2+ hour Part 2, ABC stopped the movie for the President's 9/11 anniversary speech. He spent 20 minutes turning a speech about 9/11 into a speech on his failed War in Iraq.
Then, the last section of movie played. I watched as our government's helplessness on that day was resurrected in vivid docudrama.
At the end, the movie quoted the 9/11 Commission Report's finding that we have done little to make this country less vulnerable to terrorist attack today than it was on 9/11/01.
By this time, I needed some nice, soft music.
9/11/01 is the date this country's path irrevocably changed. But we, as a nation and as a people did not change that day. When we woke up on Sept 12th, we were not different people. We were the same people trying to make sense of a horrific tragedy.
The date we changed was 3/9/03. The date we invaded Iraq. The date we lost our soul. We cheered our troops on as if we were watching a football game. We accepted our President's explanations as if they made sense. We did not ask questions. We did not require proof. We became the aggressors.
Now, we are not a nation wounded by a cowardly attack. We are a nation wounded by a foolish war we could have avoided. We have shown that we are no better than the ones we call our enemies.
The anniversary of 9/11/01 lays in the shadow of 3/9/03. These events have been forever intertwined. We cannot mourn the one without experiencing the frustration and pain of the other.
So I was thinking about 2006 in music...It's been a good year with Rabbit Fur Coat, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, At War With the Mystics, Return to Cookie Mountain, The Avalanche and sheer awesomeness like The Crane Wife and Emily Haines's solo album yet to come.
But compare that to some of the music years of the past. For example, here are the highlights of 1971:
WOW. It's hard to imagine a year that huge today, even with the current upswing in great music from the indie scene.
Blogger is one of the slicker things I've seen on the Internet, but lately I've been getting fed up with it's rich text editor. It seems like unless you write things in a certain order (like quoting and italics), it's too easy to have things screw up. I'm not sure if this is a problem with Blogger and Firefox or just Blogger in general, but it happens.
So, it's very cool that Microsoft has released the Windows Live Writer (which I'm using to write this now). Basically, it's a normal Windows desktop app with an Office-like look that lets you post (despite the name) to basically every popular type of blog.
Kudos to Microsoft for coming up with something this cool and making it broadly compatible.
Regardless of the fact that he works in an entirely different medium, Newman appears to be settling into the parameters set forth by Sarris's 1962 "auteur theory". Sarris's thesis (itself an extension of François Truffaut's politiques des auteurs, published in a 1954 edition of Cahiers du Cinéma) argues "over a group of films a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature". Later, in his book The American Cinema, Sarris would offer further clarification: "Ultimately, the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography. The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist. The parts, however entertaining individually, must cohere meaningfully."
Like Alfred Hitchcock's storyboarded mise en scène or John Ford's pitting of solitary figures against the expansive backdrop of Monument Valley, Newman's giddy music, drunk on its own effervescence, is such a stylized idealization of pop's possibilities that it can't be anything but auteurism.
"Is chintzy one of those racist code words, like "gyp"? I await the terse communiques from Lower Chintzia."
-Penny Arcade's Tycho Brahe
President's Day is today, and most people think this is a meaningless holiday.
It actually does have a lot of meaning because it was created for the celebration of all the presidents of the United States.
Originally, George Washington's birthday and Abraham Lincoln's birthday were two separate federal holidays in February until 1968, when Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill.
The bill, however, didn't become effective until 1971, combining Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays into one day called President's Day. It exists to honor all presidents and it is celebrated on the third Monday of February.
TBN, which is the most-watched religious network according to the Neilson ratings, is airing the award-winning documentary "In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed," which is about Ronald Reagan and the 40-year campaign against the Soviet Union and communism.
The film has been getting great reviews and broke box office records in multiple cities when it was released in 2004.
It is considered one of the best documentaries on Reagan and the Cold War, and TBN is expecting high ratings for this President's Day feature.
The documentary is based on Peter Schweizer s best-selling novel "Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism." This book is best known for saying that Reagan achieved the final victory over the Soviet Union through direct confrontation.
I consider him to be the greatest president of the 20th century. His contribution to ending the Cold War and fighting communism was one of the biggest victories ever in U.S. history because it was the first time the U.S. fought against a superpower with nuclear weapons.
In the last couple days my PC has shut off a few times out of nowhere. It is usually preceeding by a message that my video card isn't getting enough power and that the settings are being turned down.
I havent changed anything with my PC's setup in months. Is this just a problem of my PC not getting enough power?
On the back of the Power Supply there is a red switch. I have it on 110. Do you think turning it to 240 would help?
I'm really clueless here. Thanks GAF.
I'm old enough to remember when we were the good guys.
The US did not invade without prior attack.
The US did not torture.
The US believed in the right to public trial.
The US did not spy on its own citizens.
The US had legitimate popular elections.
The US was a role model for other nations.
