Recently...

Recent top 4:
1. This really nice sports-related apparel site.
2. Eating poutine and a piece of HC's foie gras, spam and hamburger tower at this place.
3. Accapella Will Oldham show in the back of a guitar shop in Santa Monica.
4. Going through the Universal Studios House of Horrors with a fellow teacher and four female students. Grad night at Disneyland in two weeks!

it may be suicide by tiny increments...

...but i still think smoking looks cool.



supposedly this fat little two year old puts down two packs a day.

The Lost Finale:

so as everyone in the english speaking world is aware, ABC's LOST had it's final episode on sunday. the lady and i watched in a room owensboro, kentucky comfort inn and suites, where i had a hearing the following morning. got a little applebees to go and a 40 oz, and settled down for the spectacle.

basically, i thought it was a really good finale. locke vs. jack, as it was from the beginning. a little weird how quickly smokey locke went down, and that kate did him in rather than jack. but enjoyable all the same. this finale brought a degree of closure, but still left an intriguing number of unanswered questions to think about. how long did hurley run the island? how long did kate, sawyer, etc live when the got off the island, and what did they do? the flash sideways/alternate reality set up well as a purgatory/heaven reunion scene. which, i think, is the kind of thing people wanted to see. (btw, the whole flash sideways plotline kind of echoes this flick).

of course the critics / message boards seemingly could not disagree more. but whatever. what were they expecting? seriously? there is no conceivable way all of the loose ends could have been tied up. i suppose it would have been more austere and "real" just to have jack die and do away with the whole flash sideways. but it would have been less enjoyable.

the problem is that tv critics / pretentious fans always want to view television as art. without retreading previous ad nauseum discussions, i do believe there are some shows that qualify (yes the wire, also mad men, sopranoes, friday night lights). these are shows that, from the beginning, have sought to have literary narratives. they have sought to be realistic/naturalistic/whatever. LOST has never sought those things. it was about entertainment. it was a network tv blockbuster. it has more in common with heroes or flashforward than it does the wire; it's just that it's a lot better than those shows. LOST has definitely floundered at times, but at the end of the day that's what it was. an addictive, slightly dumb but very entertaining tv show. and there ain't a thing wrong with that.

500 puzzled rednecks

As much as it would have made for a great fourth of July (if he would have come in the first place) the fact that he's not coming isn't nearly as depressing as this line: "His satire is probably something that we didn’t feel suited our small-town atmosphere."

Superhero for a day

So my lovely girlfriend likes to read the Good News Network. She brought this Seattle story to my attention. Pretty inspiring and a good read if you're wondering who to donate money to this year. Also read the comments....

Never Gets Old

Sure we've heard this one before, but that doesn't mean it's not very, very funny.

Makes sense to me

I love this guy's ads.

this movie looks pretty awesome....

zirk ziegler turned me on to this one. i think it looks great. casey affleck is a good lead, he showed that in gone baby gone.

playoff woe:

ok, so the hawks. i'm about as big of a fan as anyway of the hawks. they're a top 4 team in the eastern conference...and i think it may well be time to start over. "the living legend" kenny bowman forwarded me this article, and i think it makes some good points about why the hawks' offense seems as stagnant as it does. the thing that got me, for those of you who watched the game last night, was josh smith pouting around the court for the entire second half. it's just embarassing. he's come a long way this year, what with not taking three and improving a bit with on the ball defense. but he is so stupid, and such a whiny baby. supposedly NBA players were polled this season about the best natural athlete in the league. lebron won the poll, josh smith was no. 2. i can't argue with that. but i still say we trade him. anyway, my proposed course of action would be three-fold. first, fire mike woodson. he's the worst coach in the league. second, let joe johnson walk. he's married to dribbling time out and then putting up a jumper. he's really good at it, but not quite good enough that he could ever lead a team to a title. third, trade josh smith for a real center to play next to horford, or possibly draft picks. next season we start building around horford. start teague over bibby, with the minutes divided evenly. i think the kid might have game. then start evans as the two and crawford still off the bench as sixth man (and probable offensive team mvp). the offense runs through horford, maybe triangle style. would we make the conference semi-finals next year with this squad? probably not. but we'd be more likely to be true contenders a couple years.

of course all this is probably wrong. maybe they should just fire woodson, bring in a coach with some semblance of offensive/defensive strategies. and a coach with enough balls to bench josh when he plays like an idiot. maybe a somebody like this dude, who turned the then newly assembled 2008 celtics squad into one of the best defensive teams of the last couple decades.

Miracles

Speaking of Philadelphia Sports Fans...

Phillie fan running loose in the outfield and eventually getting tasered. Funny on a lot of levels.

Two big things

Have you seen Big Fan? It's directed and written by the guy who did the Wrestler. Definitely worth watching. The John Prine (a favorite) song at the end is quite apropos. Yes, the main dude in the movie is really obsessive, but who isn't? It's sports for one person, religion for the next, politics for the third. The movie shines a light on what society considers "successful" --or maybe it's just a movie about how much Philadelphia sports fans suck. If you have netflix, you can watch it on instant streaming.




I think I'm the first person to acquire a box set (it was a birthday present from the Ms.) in 10 years. It's the Big Star box set and it's pretty cool. Like many box sets, you gotta skip tracks but there are plenty of deep cut gems. Astra would have done (and probably did) an awesome version of Chris Bell's "I Am the Cosmos." I can't get enough of songs like "Thirteen," "Holocaust," "Feel," "The Ballad of El Goodo," "In the Street," etc. etc. The packaging, photos, and accompanying booklet with the cds look damn good. Give the band a listen if you haven't already done so.

lest we forget our origins:

so i just realized that 4KS recently had its 5th anniversary. ridiculous. to celebrate the occasion, i wanted to re-post a classic 4KS post regarding our old pal sauce and the boys of astra. enjoy.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

"spiritual harmonics"

the following is taken from the january 26th edition of the flagpole. this excerpt speaks to astra's preternatural apperception of cosmic forces:


Claiming the influences of devotional texts such as Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching as well as those of philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung, Astra embeds a sense of spirituality in its music. "Most of the things I write are meditations on those scriptures, pretty much," says Tracy. "I don't think it's necessary to give everyone in the band those chapters to read for them to understand the song. For me, there's that element. I think we all agree music is a pretty serious thing, it's a kind of alchemy, it's a way to understand yourself, the cosmos and reality."

When the band is practicing or performing, Tracy likes to envision a musical mandala. Mandala is a Sanskrit word that represents circle, polygon, community and connection; in Tibetan Buddhism, mandalas are images or pictographs that are to be contemplated during meditation. There are many different ones, each with lessons to teach, and they are the source of much inspiration for Tracy.

"There's always so much detail in the mandalas," he says. "So much energy and information is contained within them that you know you could stare at it for a long time and never fully get everything from it. Sometimes when we're playing and we're playing really well, that's when I feel like we've hit that mandalic transcendental state where we could just play and play for hours without ever getting exhausted."