Cheering Aloud For The Human Animal... -
Clicksies if you want to be flung from bleeding-edge cave exploration to the frontiers of human space travel. If the last five minutes don’t make you go “Fuck yes! I want to die on the moon in a bid to push the human race into interstellar travel.” I feel like you either a)lack vision or b)are mysteriously content with whatever you have here.
This is basically the first step in giving every great thing we’ve ever done a chance to outlive the knowledge that the sun will one day engulf everything. You know that Flaming Lips song about how everyone you know is gonna die someday? This is the antidote to that feeling, the sense that we have no choice but to be gutsy enough to rage towards infinity with exploration as our only priority. Yes, there’s a whiff of being a suicide mission to it, but there’s something in there as well that represents such an absolute affirmation of how far we’ve gone and how much further we still can go that I can’t help but get utterly jazzed every time I watch this.
Space frontiers and cave diving genius. I am cheering for human beings: http://bit.ly/hcbeb
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Re-assesing identifying as an MC w/r/t misogyny/violence/materialism in hip-hop VS my beliefs… Whatevs, Ima drop some shit in 7/4 & eat.
…it counts as an urban hike, especially if there are hills.
Me and one of my brilliant bffs covered a lot of ground, both conversationally and geograpgically this late-afternoon.
Basically, we both wish it was still the 60s so that radicalism could be simple again.
Also, I revealed that I think of “C.R.E.A.M” as a really awesome Girl Talk cover, facts to the contrary.
This assessment is a metaphor for a lot of other things discussed that basically all fall under the rubric of “))<>((.”
via:ryancox:mostabortedsamo:showerbeers:mellorstrummer:joseanything:goddamnitsweetheart:coregasm:drunkmonkeh:chipolatafingers:
via saveandclose:tigerlilylily:lor3ana
Good thing I was being ironic the whole time.
Had a productive lunch meeting. Rapping for a spell, followed by urban hike. Open to plans for later.
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There’s about 20 minutes of sheer, “Holy shit, I am little* again and everything is suffused with spiritual glows and impossible menace!” magic in this thing. Plus, it feels true to the spirit of the book in ways that I admire the people behind it for not only being perceptive enough to notice, but visionary enough to execute.
Yet, the plotting and dialogue are bobbled all to Hell. Basically, they set out to make the whole thing feel like it’s following Max’s logic of story and dialogue. It works correctly about a third of the time, the rest of the time it is precisely as engaging as having an actual 8 year old tell you a story. I cared by default and there are some fits of naive insight in there, but I sorta wanted it to be over, or at least less digressive and nonsensical, most of the time. You get that it’s a character’s psychology playing itself out through these monsters, but your involvement in it ends up being nominal because the whole aesthetic mechanism is so intrusive and the characters so transparently extant only to serve as fragmentary engines of this larger point that it never feels like anything is at stake. Imagine if the burgulars in “Panic Room” slipped in and out of addressing each other as “Id,” “Ego” and “SuperEgo” and you can pretty easily imagine how quickly the cleverness wears into “Damn, good thing these special effects are brillz, because my eyes are the ONLY part of me that’s believing this.”
Also the soundtrack is terrible. You know how you listen to “Tim” by The Replacements and are like “Damn this is a classic, but why does everything sound like every other awful, tinny thing from the 80s?” The easy answer, maybe not specifically with “Tim” (but with lotsa other great 80s records) is “Cocaine is a Hell of a drug.” With the “Wild Things” score, it’s more like “This NPR/BNM-Indie stuff is one of the biggest games in town and our demographic will probably read it as super-affecting. Thus, we should just make a hyperreal version of it, but simplified so that stoned kids in Slipknot shirts who probably snuck in anyways will also dig it.” It kinda works, but it also sounds incredibly dated, shitty and aggressively lowest-common-denominator; Despite being part of a current movie that’s got tons of creddiness in it’s sails. When we look back on the IndieQuirk Era in a few years, I have a feeling that very few people won’t be willing to concede that this film is, on some level, a casualty of a lot of the stupider aspects of that aesthetic.
So yes, if you loved the book you’ll find some things to love about this one. I don’t feel like it raped my childhood or anything like that. In fact, several moments totally made me feel five again in the best way possible. However, I do feel like it could have invested 20% more courageousness about giving the audience credit and not smacking everything on the nose and been a 60% more affecting, engaging film as a result.
*I played Max in an interpretive dance version of this thing when I was 8, so I clearly went in wanting to love the thing no matter what.
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Finally bought Casiotone For The Painfully Alone’s “Vs. Children” last night. It’s definitely a front runner for my album of the year. Granted, it’s been a weak year, but nearly every song has a moment of luminous horror in it. Owen Ashworth is seldom loquacious, but he’s a brutally efficient storyteller and I’m consistently in awe of his ability to turn three details and a gesture into a feeling of irrevocable damage.
This is Ryan Moore. He’s a professional golfer and a professional hipster. He doesn’t even wear golf shoes. He wears sneakers with cleats installed.
I’m not sure if this is a sad day for golf or a great day for hipsters (or vice versa).
I can’t tell which direction the gentrification is even going in anymore.