RIP, Don Cornelius

by: hhex65

Thu Feb 02, 2012 at 09:00:00 AM MST

So maybe it wasn't an illness, I don't know how you go out like that. The first one who updated about this was saying that they thought he had killed dancing, ruined it. See, Don Cornelius realized it was You or I who mattered, not the professional dancers; it was about being part of something and having fun-- not being judged for prizes. You can't get me to understand why people complained about Soul Train. RIP, Don Cornelius.

When I first heard it I felt like I should go out, like, and do some kind of special American celebration or figure out why people complained about him it was who cared about every form of public dancing, pride and fun. Then many people complained that he died from suicide and they were saddened. Who among Americans gave us such celebrations? I don't know that people have even realized it but him it was who cared most of all about spreading the simple pleasures of dancing in public. When did American celebrations just become a symptom of an illness? When did the Soul Train derail? RIP, Don Cornelius. RIP, the 1970's.  

Nominalism

by: hhex65

Wed Feb 01, 2012 at 09:00:00 AM MST

There are others. I mean, I'm almost comfortable with the L.A. Lakers just from its overexposure, alliteration and euphonious quality. But I still remember they were the Minneapolis Lakers before moving in 1961. That name made sense. Then there is the case of the Arizona Cardinals and the St. Louis Rams. I suppose Rams is a generic team name, signifying toughness or something-- they were originally from Cleveland anyway. But it sucks that St. Louis can't have 2 teams named Cardinals anymore.

Kudos to Oklahoma City for renaming the SuperSonics to the Thunder, I think they're reaping the benefits of this wise move. And I'm happy with the new Winnipeg Jets and the Titans of Tennessee. It just sets the balance of the universe right when this happens. I think of Browns/Ravens/Colts and all that-- it can get sorted out.

In the MLB only the L.A. (trolley) Dodgers seems weird to me, just perverse in some way. I guess I can think of them as the L.A. (car) Dodgers instead, that makes sense.

Elsewhere in the NBA, I'll never get used to the Washington Wizards-- but at least they changed their uniforms back to more of a Bullets style. Of course they are awful now so it hardly matters. Memphis Grizzlies seems like a stretch but I suppose there are bears around there, just like there are probably hornet nests in New Orleans. Or the name could be simply a signifier of ferocity or speed, that's fine.

In the NHL... I don't know. I can't get with any teams in warm weather areas, so whatever. I really only follow the "Original Six" teams: Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks, Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs. I'm a purist that way.

This perplexity can apply to band names too, sometimes. I was in a band that I thought was done with when I left but it turned out that some of the people kept the band name going in a slightly changed form to exploit the earlier work. But I didn't hold on to the trademark, I was more a player than an owner ultimately. Do I really want to see The Coasters when, presently, the guy with the longest tenure in the band joined in 2001? Hold on to those trademarks, I guess that is the lesson for today.

you cannot petition the Refs with prayer

by: hhex65

Sat Jan 21, 2012 at 10:00:00 AM MST

video fireplace

by: hhex65

Fri Jan 20, 2012 at 09:00:00 AM MST

ravens is fleetwood mac

by: hhex65

Wed Jan 18, 2012 at 22:20:42 PM MST

After Peter Green left The Mac had a series of people up front singing and playing including Danny Kirwan, Christine McVie, Bob Welch, Bob Weston, Dave Walker, Bobby Hunt & Doug Graves until they finally hooked up with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in 1975. Then they had huge success culminating in the 1976 multi-platinum LP "Rumours."

After Dilfer the Ravens were QB'd by Kyle Boller, Troy Smith, Steve McNair, Anthony Wright, Jeff Blake, Chris Redman and Elvis Grbac with varying results. Then finally in 2008 the estimable Joe Flacco took over. In his rookie year he took the Ravens to the AFC championship. They've made the playoffs ever since. Now they again have a chance to go to the Super Bowl, the NFL equivalent of recording "Rumours." But will the Bass and Drums of the Ravens cede some power to the offensive side? Will they let creativity flow so a "Rumours" can happen?-- or will they kneecap Joe Flacco and remake "Penguin" once again? Let's see:

McVie would never have undermined Stevie Nicks publicly like that. He wanted the whole team to win.

irrational negativity

by: hhex65

Tue Jan 17, 2012 at 01:55:54 AM MST

Sure, LeBron is a villain but I'd bet he'd never say that stuff. Denver realized Carmelo would leave so they dumped him and got some pieces back. The Cleveland fans would have gone nuts if LeBron had been traded and so in the end they got nothing and the fans went nuts. In fact, the Cavs got a $14.5m trade exception for him but they let it expire without doing anything with it. Denver made the playoffs last year and they look good now. They have good depth, at least. Nurse that hate, it'll kill ya.

On This, The Holiest of Days

by: hhex65

Fri Jan 13, 2012 at 23:17:13 PM MST

The religion of Luck bears some resemblances to religions of the past:

• The Daba religion of the Mosuo culture is based on the worship of a guardian mother goddess.


• The Iroquois League operated by The Great Binding Law of Chance, composed in the year 1000.


• Leibniz' The Monadology describes Monads as units generated by continual flashes of the Divinity; these Monads are individually programmed to act in a predetermined way, each program being coordinated with all the others.

We respect the ultimate divinity Luck and seek to be one with it.

so mad I could spit

by: chill

Wed Jan 11, 2012 at 09:00:00 AM MST

Then one day people just got used to it but even now people say that is what makes music just a hobby again. They're very wrong, and this statement proves something of their lack of understanding about what music is. The creation of an idea is all about what the song gives the listener and what they will remember by it. Not the details of what you want the listener to experience but just the chance that the listener will bring the music to life.

You know to hear complaints all over creation about what the song sold, that is pathetic because selling still functions. It's only the form of records that are gone and some people can't stand that it gives more people the will to realize that music provides the listener the idea of making things to remember certain times; once it was on cassettes now it is with files.

To see what I mean about it listen carefully and literally to songs about what people have done for love, look at when and where the songs were recorded-- is that what you remember about the song?

Smokestack Lightning

by: hhex65

Mon Jan 09, 2012 at 09:00:00 AM MST

Wolf was a self-taught hobby chemist and during breaks in the recording studio he would often sip from his jug and muse about the eventual creation of a compound that could provide enhanced erectile function. He believed it would be sold in the form of a pill. Wolf knew he wouldn't live to see it happen but the song as recorded is truly a bit of pharmaceutical prophecy.

In 1970 Chester (Wolf's first given name) spoke about it to Alan de Pres in the journal Ailleurs:

warmth for winter

by: hhex65

Wed Jan 04, 2012 at 09:00:00 AM MST

The Year is a Mamzer

by: hhex65

Mon Jan 02, 2012 at 09:00:00 AM MST

And this year is really going to be an ugly, racist bastard. I'm not the kind who can just ignore everything they call "the social construction of reality"-- I can operate parallel to it, I guess, but I still can't achieve total oblivion.

I found two quotes that describe this feeling. One from GK Chesterton:

Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.

and this one from Samuel Beckett, with a weird pre-echo of a familiar American voice:

Then the gnashing ends, or it goes on, and one is in the pit, in the hollow, the longing for longing gone, the horror of horror, and one is in the hollow, at the foot of all the hills at last, the ways down, the ways up, and free, free at last, for an instant free at last, nothing at last.

2012! It could be good.

sports reports

by: hhex65

Thu Dec 29, 2011 at 15:13:23 PM MST

Looking forward to the Giants v Cowboys on Sunday night, winner goes to the playoffs. Eli Manning is 8-5 all-time against the Cowboys. Even better is that Eli Manning is 4-1 against any team wherein the brothers Ryan are employed as coaches. His only loss came in 2004 (rookie season) against the Baltimore Ravens where Rex Ryan was the defensive line coach at the time.

I am a vestigial Giants fan from having lived there during the Phil Simms era-- but my real team (since 70s and childhood) is the Oakland Raiders. They are playing San Diego, whilst Denver and Kansas City play one another. If Denver loses and Oakland wins Raiders make the playoffs. Also, as you may know, The Chiefs will have Kyle Orton at QB. He was released by Denver after Tim Tebow took over the starting job.

Recent News

by: hhex65

Wed Dec 28, 2011 at 09:00:00 AM MST

modèles pathétiques

by: hhex65

Thu Dec 22, 2011 at 09:00:00 AM MST

It's that shared humanity that has converted these appliances to innovations. For such things our reaction beseems the moment as it is truly a gesture of respect for whatever it is that we each, personally, venerate most highly. It could be love, strength, the recognition of simultaneous desire, or a future where imagination reigns.

I know this all depends on who gets to market under just the right circumstances &c. and who most controls those circumstances. Even with so much effort going into control, even if I've been limited over time to recognize only 3 or 4 forms, being always able to gather in this way is something I would fight for.

When I see people who are incredibly drunk or high do things that are crazy or dangerous, talk their way out of fights they instigated or ride on the roof of a car on a highway, I get impressed by it in a jolly sort of way. However, when I did things like that I just felt terrible at the time, like I had a death wish, and I felt really bad the next day when I remembered what I had done.

Once we were on tour in Europe and a friend of mine had 3 bottles of red wine, a pasta casserole and a chunk of hash. Back at the hotel after a while they got up off the floor and started heaving into the bathtub-- tub all filled with red and food &c. It was funny as fuck. I liked the person even more after having witnessed this, we'd shared a hilarious moment. They were not pleased, though, they didn't like everyone laughing and they were sick all of the next day. We had such high esteem for them but we were connected in only a primitive way that technology has since corrected.

ticky wicky wicky wacky woo

by: hhex65

Wed Dec 21, 2011 at 09:00:00 AM MST

feria!

by: hhex65

Thu Dec 15, 2011 at 17:39:25 PM MST

The 1895 schism between the laws of rugby union and rugby league football is temporarily lifted, kids play tiddley-winks with the bones of Saint Boniface of Dokkum, every movie theater in America shows a triple-bill of "Tomb Raider," "Prince of Persia," and "Resident Evil: Afterlife" at three in the afternoon, surgery for corns is traditionally discounted by 20% on days of Feria.

On days of Feria it is legal to jailbreak your neighbor's iPhone yet it is forbidden to consume Spinnenkäse, a cheese made from quark and produced using the action of cheese mites. On days of Feria South Padre Island is closed to men so that women can sunbath freely but tanning beds throughout 17 states are legally required to serve only men over the age of 60. On the first day of the Winter Feria, registration for the Santa Elena International Pageant of the Flowers opens while nominations for the Dutton Animal Book Award close.

On days of Feria your lucky numbers will be: 15, 16, 28, 33, 38, 23. Amicalola Falls State Park will be closed. Production of natural sweetgums will commence. Stark white, decadent red, deep orange, and sage green are the colors of Feria.

Rodrigo Christian

by: hhex65

Mon Dec 12, 2011 at 20:06:01 PM MST

those dry bones

by: hhex65

Fri Dec 09, 2011 at 23:39:42 PM MST

So, there's this brain damaged young woman, the titular "Bones," who believes she is a super special bone scientist, world renown crime fiction writer and multi-millionaire. She works at a place that doesn't exist in a reconstructed version of Washington, DC. She works at "The Jeffersonian" and she is surrounded by agents who pretend to be Federal Investigators and Forensic Scientists but since she has the social awareness and intellect of a child the simulation doesn't have to go very far to achieve a level of veracity which completely subsumes her consciousness.

Every week they lay out a kind of murder mystery for her and she parades around in her brain damaged way using her magic-science to divine the perpetrator by examining human bones. Her handlers push her this way and that with their various additional "specialities" like portrait drawing or entomology. Their personalities are constructed so as to keep "Bones" herself limited to a particular set of personality traits which she needs to define and maintain her individuality.

If, for example, she needs a Chronoprint depicted in Interactive Holography she demands it from one of her assistants who specializes in such non-existent technology. In the next scene that exact infantile fantasy of medical analysis has always been invented and everyone stands around it and it gives them some crucial information. If Bones sits in on a police interrogation it plays out like a half-remembered scene from a very early "Law and Order" episode, one with Paul Sorvino in it, something she fell asleep to in the hospital when she was a child and near death with a fever that destroyed most of her brain.

They never reveal what important information they are truly getting out of Bones by trapping her in this simulated reality. I like to imagine that the choices she makes in order to solve the false cases generate numerical coordinates that help monitor the path of a dark matter cloud that is heading towards Earth. Only her savant-driven 7th Sense can see and track it.

For bonus fun I like to imagine that David Boreanaz (he plays the pretend FBI agent) is in reality still Angel (from the eponymous TV show and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") but no one else knows he's a vampire. He has infiltrated this operation in order to help keep the universe in balance or whatever.

Ultimately the show Bones is about what kind of show I, as a part of a computer simulation, would need to see to keep me from recognizing that I live in a simulated universe while simultaneously giving me the uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that I myself could be living in a simulated universe.

And that's why I watch Bones.

beat my baby

by: hhex65

Thu Dec 08, 2011 at 23:50:21 PM MST

I guess I immediately jumped to an outlying approach in order to say Ronnie Spector's situation was worse because although Tina Turner's was an inhuman and terrible situation I felt the fear could have even been compounded in Ronnie Spector's case since she had in a sense been shown the Ace, the prophecy that Diana Ross was meant to fulfill so to speak; she was shown a possibility that was constantly under threat of being snatched away.

Whereas, Tina Turner would have had no expectations that she should have been treated fairly in any way, or celebrated for her genius in the United States during the time she was coming up. That is, I said, I highly doubt that Ed Sullivan would have given a second thought if he'd seen a make-up padded black eye on Tina Turner-- whereas if Mama Cass had a sad look on her face he'd be all concerned etc.

Today I was thinking about it some more and then I thought I was totally wrong, just talking smoke-- and why were we sitting around comparing misery like that, anyway? Gee whiz, what gave us the detachment to utter such things? In my defense, I get a real endorphin high from work; that plus the pizza probably helped.

This is why I don't read music biographies.

SAINT LUCY

by: hhex65

Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 18:08:49 PM MST

Saint Lucy was an important figure in the Church by December, 1337. Citations of her feast day are seen as early as 1209.

In the 16th Century the tradition was revived by French Republican winners of the Battle of The Saints, and because of that battle slaves were free. A short time later, between the wealthy plantations laboring under the guillotine and a shortage of pine wood which was used to burn part of the island a revolutionary tribunal was sent to restore order to Saint Lucy's Day.