Wonderful Days
It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you, without a dope blog to link to. To wit:
Friday night I braved the throngs of picketers and attended the blogger happy hour at Mezza Luna. Well, supposedly there was this huge protest, but by the time I got there (8pm), they'd either been and gone, or never were there at all. So much for that. I guess it had to have happened--after all, if it's on the Internet, it must be true!
In any event, I had a marvelous time chatting with old friends, making new ones, and hanging out with some very beautiful women. What more can one ask for? :)
Yesterday and today I spent oodles of time outside, breathing in the sunshine, the clear blue sky, the oceans of blooming flowers and the throngs of people walking, driving, loving, and laughing. At one point I was on 16th Street, sitting outside a home with this wrought-iron table and chairs for passersby, marveling at how beautiful our world is. It's fitting that today is Earth Day, because this kind of weather is the best way to make people understand just how fragile and delicate our world's ecosystem is. We are bound by our duty to one another to take care of it, to keep it safe for future generations. Our legacy as a species should not be that we ushered in our own destruction through stupidity and short-sightedness.
GO SEE THIS MOVIE. It completely succeeds at being a loving parody of action movie cliches while actually making for a decent action movie in its own right. The dream team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg skewer every modern action-movie trope in the book--the multiple false endings, the homoerotic subtexts, the 360-degree camera pans, the John Woo gunplay--while making an engaging and gut-bustingly funny flick that starts like a horse on steroids from the gate and doesn't let up. An absolute winner. The audience I saw it with was laughing, clapping, and cheering almost continuously. "Shit just got real," indeed. "Yeah, motherfuckerrrrrrr!!!!"
My primary playlists at the moment have mostly consisted of VNV Nation's new one, "Judgement," and Nine Inch Nails' "Year Zero". The former is a more urgent and slightly more depressing work than "Matter & Form," which still holds its place as my all-time fave VNV disc. But Ronan is in excellent form here, rocking his ass off on the apocalyptic warnings of "Testament" and "Nemesis," then balancing them out with gorgeous, elegaic instrumentals like "As It Fades." His instrumentals make me think of Vangelis, actually--spare, haunting, and emotional tugs to the heart and soul.
The latter is an even more openly apocalyptic masterwork--Trent has created a concept album of a dystopic nightmare future where America has been completely overtaken by evangelical crazies, drugs are tainting the water supplies that deaden the sex drive and turn us into zombies, and the hand of God is literally breaking through the heavens to pass righteous vengeance on us all. The album has been augmented by a massive ARG experience that completely envelops the player in the depressing, bleak world that "Year Zero" envisions.
The music itself is actually not as bombastic and operatic as you'd expect. Trent actually underplays it a lot, going for trippy funk grooves and metal pop over aggro thrash, but this actually works better in terms of the subtle creeping dread that comes from watching your freedoms stripped away, one by one. Excellent work by Trent--the best since "Downward Spiral"--and needed now more than ever.
Friday night I braved the throngs of picketers and attended the blogger happy hour at Mezza Luna. Well, supposedly there was this huge protest, but by the time I got there (8pm), they'd either been and gone, or never were there at all. So much for that. I guess it had to have happened--after all, if it's on the Internet, it must be true!
In any event, I had a marvelous time chatting with old friends, making new ones, and hanging out with some very beautiful women. What more can one ask for? :)
Yesterday and today I spent oodles of time outside, breathing in the sunshine, the clear blue sky, the oceans of blooming flowers and the throngs of people walking, driving, loving, and laughing. At one point I was on 16th Street, sitting outside a home with this wrought-iron table and chairs for passersby, marveling at how beautiful our world is. It's fitting that today is Earth Day, because this kind of weather is the best way to make people understand just how fragile and delicate our world's ecosystem is. We are bound by our duty to one another to take care of it, to keep it safe for future generations. Our legacy as a species should not be that we ushered in our own destruction through stupidity and short-sightedness.
GO SEE THIS MOVIE. It completely succeeds at being a loving parody of action movie cliches while actually making for a decent action movie in its own right. The dream team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg skewer every modern action-movie trope in the book--the multiple false endings, the homoerotic subtexts, the 360-degree camera pans, the John Woo gunplay--while making an engaging and gut-bustingly funny flick that starts like a horse on steroids from the gate and doesn't let up. An absolute winner. The audience I saw it with was laughing, clapping, and cheering almost continuously. "Shit just got real," indeed. "Yeah, motherfuckerrrrrrr!!!!"
My primary playlists at the moment have mostly consisted of VNV Nation's new one, "Judgement," and Nine Inch Nails' "Year Zero". The former is a more urgent and slightly more depressing work than "Matter & Form," which still holds its place as my all-time fave VNV disc. But Ronan is in excellent form here, rocking his ass off on the apocalyptic warnings of "Testament" and "Nemesis," then balancing them out with gorgeous, elegaic instrumentals like "As It Fades." His instrumentals make me think of Vangelis, actually--spare, haunting, and emotional tugs to the heart and soul.
The latter is an even more openly apocalyptic masterwork--Trent has created a concept album of a dystopic nightmare future where America has been completely overtaken by evangelical crazies, drugs are tainting the water supplies that deaden the sex drive and turn us into zombies, and the hand of God is literally breaking through the heavens to pass righteous vengeance on us all. The album has been augmented by a massive ARG experience that completely envelops the player in the depressing, bleak world that "Year Zero" envisions.
The music itself is actually not as bombastic and operatic as you'd expect. Trent actually underplays it a lot, going for trippy funk grooves and metal pop over aggro thrash, but this actually works better in terms of the subtle creeping dread that comes from watching your freedoms stripped away, one by one. Excellent work by Trent--the best since "Downward Spiral"--and needed now more than ever.