The Coachella 2009 line up was recently announced, and, no, I’m not going cause I’m old. Anyway, the line up is kickass and Sunday rules: The Cure, My Bloody Valentine, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Peter Bjorn and John, Paul Weller, X, Jenny Lewis, Lykke Li, Okkervil River, etc, etc, etc, and, wait, Shepard Fairey?! WTF?
I wish I was 21 and lived in California…
UPDATE: Fairey’s gonna be DJing
Andrew Bird performing “Fitz and The Dizzyspells” from his new album Noble Beast on the Late Show. I’m loving it. Letterman seems to dig too…
I’m going to see him tonight at the Orpheum. I read somewhere that at a recent show he didn’t play any songs from his “Armchair Apocrypha” album, which is a major disappointment. If he doesn’t play “Armchairs” I’ll be :-(
A rant about you dear co-workers. A rant because I am sick and tired of your endless talk about your suburban house and the work it requires, and your kids and what they did and how cute it was, and your boring stories about your neighbor and about the awesome dinner you had at that chain restaurant at the strip mall, and your daughter’s much hated boyfriend, and your boyfriend and your cousin and your friend, and your sports, and what you had for lunch and dinner, and what you watched on TV, and your funny ha ha stories. Enough. Basta. Leave me alone.
And yes, I dislike you too, you the one who asks how my weekend was, so that you in return can tell me how your weekend was. Uhh, well, I did not ask you and I do not care. Stop boring me to death. I do not want to know. And then when I say I did something, you have to come up with something much better, as in “oh, yeah? yeah, I did this super cool thing twenty years ago”. Listen up: just because you were cool twenty, ten years ago, does not mean that you are still cool and interesting. If you want to be relevant, BE relevant, but your desire to be so is not enough.
And what I hate the most, is when you present as your own something funny or new I told you ten minutes ago. You know I can hear you repeating it to other people. Yes, I am flattered that you adopt my words and my ideas, but your shameless stealing and presenting it as your own is obnoxious. So C U T I T O U T.
Yeah, good talking to you, too.
It’s been busy and my mind keeps jumping from one thing to another constantly. So many things I’m doing and planning, so many more things that I want to do, and no matter how tired I feel there is always the sense that not too much has been accomplished. I want to be stronger.
Anyway, this past weekend I saw two, actually three movies. I saw “Waltz with Bashir”, an Israeli animated film, that basically deals with the filmmaker’s inexplicable inability to remember his participation in the 1982 Lebanon war, where he was a soldier serving with the isreali forces. Ari Folman’s film shows with incredible honesty the trauma of the soldiers who witnesses death and massacre, and how your brain works to shut off the unpleasant images. But it keeps one image, that keeps coming up and haunts him. He has conversations with psychologists that explain why his brain’s acting like that. Through conversations with fellow soldiers that were there, and journalists, Folman pieces together the past and remembers what had happened. No, it is not pleasant, and the final scenes of the film are almost unbearable. But they are the truth. A nasty truth that nobody likes, and would like to… well, forget.
The other movie I saw was “Che” the roadshow edition at the Kendall, which basically incorporates both parts of the epic movie directed by Steven Soderbergh. The first thing I liked about the screening was that there were no advertisements or previews. It is so damn good not to have to sit through ads. The first part shows Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s guerrilla life in Cuba, where the revolution, led by Fidel Castro, succeeded in taking power. Che, an Argentine, feels sometime that he has to explain himself why, he, a foreigner, is so interested in Cuba. Guevara had the vision of a united nations of latin america and this is how he started implementing his vision in Cuba. This part of his life is dominated by fighting in the countryside and towns of Cuba, and ultimately winning. His asthma is sometimes really bad, but he does not allow it to interfere with his work. Che is a comandante and a doctor. His appearance at the UN is also a high point, where he does not mince words and accuses other latin countries of being too dependant on foreign countries, like the US and USSR. He’s treated like a rock star in New York, but he’s detached from the glamour. I think overall the film was nicely done, and some scenes had exceptional photography.
The second part deals with Guevara’s unsuccessful bid to organize and fight the anti-government guerrilla war in Bolivia. He’s older now. He disappears from Cuba, where obviously he could have been one of the power players in Castro’s government, and goes to Bolivia. Things there are difficult. Not too many followers, the conditions are harsh, the campesinos do not cooperate, the asthma attacks are getting worse. There is lots of waiting for fighting, lots of exhaustion, and when the fighting does happen, Che’s group is crushed. Of course the Bolivian government had the assistance of the US, and Che is killed, defeated. There was a general mood of defeat hanging over the movie, which was fitting I guess.
At the end of the movie there were no credits, but we got a Che-booklet with lots of information about the film. Benicio Del Toro did an excellent job as Che. The cigar smoking Che, Che the fighter. Del Toro showed up after the screening for a half-hour Q&A and he was quite cool. He’s one of the producers of the movie, and he went to Soderbergh with the idea. He was pretty articulate and thoughtful. He graciously avoided answering if Che’s fighting has been a good thing considering the state of Cuba now, or if things would be better if his vision for united nations of latin america had succeeded. Gotta love political correctness. He mentioned another thing I did not know: that the director of photography Peter Andrews is actually an alias for Soderbergh and he said that having the same person as director and DP helped a lot to shoot the scenes more efficiently.
Well, this is it. Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th President of the USA. I was watching the Inauguration on line and was feeling happy and hopeful. Happy to see all these people united in celebration, and hopeful that our future will be less bleak than our present. I watched the old administration departing and sighed in relief. The evil man in a wheelchair, that was it, the end, good riddance.
And it was beautiful and extraordinary. The young family, the cute girls, the extended interracial family. This is the new America I thought, and I like it. We all took a break from the bad news of the economy. And for a little while, we felt giddy, happy, and even assured that we can make it, we can do better, and we can turn things around. We paused to party and enjoy the historically significant moment. And, yes, it is cool again to feel proud of your President.
From the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture
This simulated natural-color image of southeastern Fars province in southern Iran shows a dry river channel carving through arid mountains toward the northeast. A broad belt of lush agricultural land follows the curve of the alluvial fan and stretches out along a road that runs parallel to the ridgeline. The valley-ward margin of the intensely green agricultural belt fades to dull green along streams (or irrigation canals). The image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite on October 12, 2004. (NASA/Jesse Allen, NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team)
Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, several of which are represented in this photograph taken by an astronaut abourd the International Space Station on March 31, 2008. Jabal (“mountain” in Arabic) al Qidr is built from several generations of dark, fluid basalt lava flows. Jabal Abyad, in the center of the image, was formed from a more viscous, silica-rich lava classified as a rhyolite. (NASA-JSC) #
The Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter, known as Rub’ al Khali, is the world’s largest sand sea, holding about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert. The Empty Quarter covers 583,000 square kilometers (225,000 square miles), and stretches over parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Enhanced Thematic Mapper on NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite captured this image of the Empty Quarter on August 26, 2001. (NASA/Robert Simmon, Landsat,USGS) #
I am amazed with the people riding their bikes in 10F weather. How can they do it?! I have trouble breathing this cold air while standing, I can’t imagine breathing this air while biking. Actually, I don’t know, maybe I should give it a try. And then die and prove my point that I am not designed for this kind of weather. That would be brilliant.
Last night I saw the movie “Revolutionary Road”. Wow, yeah, it was very interesting watching Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio acting… Or trying to act. I didn’t sympathize with any of the characters, I didn’t care about them. That was a bad case of a movie with severe passion-deficiency syndrome. Why do they even bother making crappy movies like this?
The “Wrestler” is coming to the Somerville Theater, thank God, so I don’t have to endure the depressing ambiance of the only other theater in the area that’s been showing it. I’m looking forward to watching Marisa Tomei, and the rest of the movie, of course.
I am taking more drawing classes. I’m psyched.
Gail Collins is becoming my favourite Op-Ed columnist of the NYTimes. Now, whenever I declare my infatuation with something or someone, that particular something or someone magically turns into a major disappointment. I don’t know why this happens, I can’t explain it. So, Collins, please stay cool. These are excerpts from today’s column, “He’s Leaving. Really”, which is about Bush really leaving, and is hilarious:
The man has been saying goodbye for so long, he’s come to resemble one of those reconstituted rock bands that have been on a farewell tour since 1982.
So far, the Bush farewell appearances have not drawn a lot of rave reviews. (Most striking, perhaps, was a critique of that final press conference from Ted Anthony of The Associated Press: “It all felt strangely intimate and, occasionally, uncomfortable, in the manner of seeing a plumber wearing jeans that ride too low.”) A Gallup poll did find that his approval rating had risen slightly since they began, but this was probably due to enthusiasm for the part about his going away.
“Sometimes you misunderestimated me,” Bush told the Washington press corps.
