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December 31, 2005
Best of 2005
MUSIC
10. Spoon - Gimme Fiction
9. Mugison - Mugimama, or Is This Monkey Music
8. White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan
7. Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy
6. Iron and Wine - Woman King
5. Sigur Ros - Takk
4. MIA - Arular
3. The Decemberists - Picaresque
2. My Morning Jacket - Z
1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Overrated: Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary
Still so many albums, I've yet to hear. For the podcasting inclined, the year-end countdown on this show (All Songs Considered) has many, many good, new things to me.
FILM
(I've seen such a regrettably small number of this year's release, I hesitate to even list...)
5. Broken Flowers
4. Good Night and Good Luck
3. Capote
2. The Constant Gardener
1. Syriana
Overrated: Crash
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December 17, 2005
TVP
I just checked out 16 books from the J.D. Williams Library with subtitles like: "How we remember, forget and reconstruct the past," and "David Halberstam, the Buddhist crisis, and U.S. policy in Vietnam." My left hand is involuntarily shaking from cradling their spines while I jogged from PN2867.A89 to DS559.T87, so as not to get locked in for the weekend. I need to write a thesis...but the past two and a half days have essentially been sacrificed on the altar of 24 - Season Four DVD. A bit more back-slapping and self-referential than previous seasons, but the same antihero tendencies from the most intense television character ever, Jack Bauer.
In the meantime, there's two cans of Vienna sausages across the entry hall on top of the kitchen counter. My neighbor and friend (I prefer neighbor because it seems more real) Will left them there. Done with law exams, on his way home to Athens, he asked me to feed his stray cat, Todd Van Poppel.
----
W: So, I've been trying to get the cat to sleep with me for the past few nights.
P: Oh, yeh? How's that going for you?
W: Terribly, it won't stay in the bed with me.
P: Well, it is a stray cat.
W: I know, but I'm thinking that it needs a name.
P: What are you thinking?
W: Todd Van Poppel. And I could call him TVP for short. (pause). Do you know who I'm talking about?
P: Vaguely.
W: 1991 Oakland A's rookie pitcher.
P: Yeh, I had his card.
W: He was the first baseball player to go straight from high school to the big leagues, and he did nothing. There was all this hype around him and nothing. I've always taken an interest in Todd Van Poppel. It's this sad human interest tale.
P: Are you sure you want to shove all that embodied disappointment onto this cat?
W: You are right, maybe I should call him Jim Abbott.
----
As it turns out, you see, TVP is not a stray cat. In fact, far from it. He or she (determining feline gender is something neither I nor Will can do) has an owner. Not only that, but we are certain that at least two other residents in our apartment building feed TVP, assuming the cat is indeed a stray. To me, that makes my role as sausage slicer and cat feeder all the more urgent.
I've not only gained a cat that will sometimes dart onto my sofa, deposit dander, and cause my eyes to water for the next three days, but I've also gained a friend, my own Kramer. Take last Friday night for instance, Will is at the movie theater, watching "Syriana" with myself and a few others. So you know, "Syriana" is entirely about Middle Eastern oil and big business. In the middle of a climatic last scene where Clooney's character is driving a jeep in the desert to meet up with some Arab princes, Will leans over and says, "Man, I thought they were in Arizona the whole time." Then, two days ago, a few hours before a six-hour torts exam, Will walks in. "I haven't studied today. I can't. I've been listening to Iron Maiden all day. I wonder what it's like to be so confrontational."
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December 09, 2005
Pandora's Box
Even though this thing uses the internet, it's actually better than the internet:
www.pandora.com
It's out of the Music Genome Project, which has catalogued endless amounts of music on a number of ranking points. It ranks melody, syncopation, rhythm, etc. It's a bunch of musicologists pulling apart songs. So, Pandora is a free radio station that builds radio stations for you based on song/artist preferences.
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December 08, 2005
Always Low Prices
So, I just broke a two-year boycott of Wal-Mart to purchase the recently released season four DVD of television's 24, my own personal cocaine. Unbridled hero worship, ethical quandaries, that incessant ticking and Kiefer Sutherland's perpetual 5 o'clock shadow. I feel dirty.
The possibility of watching Jack Bauer fend off a fictional terrorist plot is enough to cleanse the dirt, the filth, the muck of my own personal failure. I should note, however, that this does not make up for that late night in Paris when I just had to have a McFlurry, therefore breaking another yearlong boycott of McDonald's.
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December 05, 2005
Hamshanks in Jesusland
This is what happens when you turn to Wikipedia to look up some stuff for tomorrow's final. I didn't know most of these even existed:
Offensive terms for citizens of the United States
Amerloque – also French slang
americanata – something that is in bad taste, vulgar (literally, a typically American thing). Italian (with cognate words in other European languages).
Americant – pun on Americans' perceived laziness.
Americunt – employed mainly by UK citizens, this refers to American tourists.
Amer (????) – Russian, mild. The stress is on the first syllable.
Amerikos (????????) ; Russian, more offensive than "amer", but still mild. The stress is on the last syllable.
Amerikanaki ; Greek, literally, "little American". Mildly offensive, used to convey image of ignorance or naivete.
Ami– German nickname, rarely used offensively ("Ami go home!"), more common to express disapproval nowadays
Bushkrieger - a German pun on Buschkrieger meaning 'bush warrior'
Bushmen – sometimes used in Poland, meaning both "men of G. W. Bush" and men living in forests
Cowboy – considered patronizing and mockery by Europeans, but many Americans are not offended. (The implication, for those who use the word in derogatory sense, is that Americans are tough and primitively vitalistic.)
gavacho (or gabacho) – Used in Mexico. For origin, see under "Offensive terms for the French"
Gringo – Foreigner.
Hamshank – rhyming slang = Yank.)
Jesusland an Internet meme satirizing the 2004 United States Presidential election. See Jesusland Map.
Ka?boj – derived from "cowboy" and the word "ka?" meaning "solid byproduct of digestion" in Polish language
'murrican or Merrican – caricature of the way some Americans pronounce the word "American".
pig – A derogatory term used to stereotype Americans as obese and fat as that of a "pig."
pindos (??????) – Russian, more offensive than "amerikos", but mild all the same. The stress is on the last syllable. Allegedly, the use of this term to refer to Americans originated in Yugoslavia during the war of 2000-2001, and was imported to Russian in the course of "brotherhood of slavonic peoples" media campaign of that time.
Ricain – French slang (shortening of the usual américain)
Round eye burger muncher – primarily used in the video game Starcraft on Battle.net by Korean players generally followed by an Anime Style emoticon
Septic/seppo – British and Australian term for Americans (rhyming slang for septic tank = Yank.) Originated from WW2 (U.S. soldiers became known for stealing the girlfriends of English men); A septic tank is used in rural areas for storage and decomposition of human waste
Yank – short for Yankees; Yanqui in Spanish, jenki in Hungarian, jenkki in Finnish; usually would not be considered offensive by an American (unless a Southerner), nor is it always intended offensively.Most commonly used in Latin America to refer to American tourist.
Americows, because americans are supposedly fat.
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December 01, 2005
The medium is the message
John Milbank: It’s because the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan put it, who not accidentally was a Catholic. And obviously I’m not saying this is true of all of the American Protestant tradition, it’s obviously not. And you know the very greatest thinkers like Jonathan Edwards did just the opposite, they made aesthetics the heart of what they were thinking about. But when the culture of the mega-church and the very anti-urban culture, people who really prefer to live in a kind of no-man’s land of shopping malls and that sort of thing; they’re suspicious of downtown because it’s too corrupt and they’re happy all the time with banal restaurants, fast food, very bland kind of architecture—and to my mind this betrays the Gospel, because I think how we treat space and time is central; the whole business of sacred time and sacred landscape is essential. And one of the things I’ve noticed strongly in America is that, I believe, up to the middle of the 20th century America was a sacred landscape in that I think it had its own quite austere but very beautiful aesthetic in its modes of building and things. And that very rapidly in the last part of the 20th century the rows of strip malls and this sort of thing has produced the most incredible uglification of the landscape; and in my mind I see this as spiritual deterioration—profound deterioration—and it seems to me that the kind of religion that is at ease with that is a very strange kind of religion, because it’s not really thinking about how we are trustees of God’s land and that the beauty of the creation is the divine call to us—that the divine demands from us an adequate response.
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=76&cview=1#cmt
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