Another reason to love our friend Wiki: an entry on unreleased songs by Madonna. I remember back in high school I used to love hearing about this stuff especially when it involved Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Unfortunately, Wiki doesn’t have anything about either of those bands, but a quick search for “unreleased songs” does turn up results about Mariah Carey and Limp Bizkit — two rather unfortunate choices, if you ask me…
I cannot help but think of the ship of fools (which I first learned about while reading Foucault‘s Madness and Civilization) while watching Pirates of the Caribbean — especially the second one, Dead Man’s Chest when they go to the Tortuga Port to find the “99 souls” to give to Davy Jones.
I think Captain Jack Sparow is the perfect example of a fool on a ship without any idea what he’s doing or where he’s going. I’m surprised I didn’t make the connection earlier. The way Johnny Depp plays the character totally adds to the idea of it, too.
I can’t believe The Stranger is hating on the new Smashing Pumpkins song, “Tarantula”!!! This is very likely my favorite Smashing Pumpkins song since Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. (Yes, I did love some of the electro-tinged stuff from Adore, but MCIS has always been my favorite…)
The song totally reminds me, in fact, of a cross between the MCIS song “Bodies” and the MCIS outtake/jam/collage “Pastichio Medley” from the “Zero” single.
Anyway, I’m loving it, and if this is a sign of what’s to come from their new album, I’m pumped.
Search for “Tarantula” on the Hype Machine and you are sure to find the mp3 somewhere…
I’m very excited that an end date has been set for Lost.
I think all of us who watch it have been worried that it would either drag on for season after season and become overly complex and irrelevant (a la The X-Files) or get canceled before things could get wrapped up neatly (a la Twin Peaks). Or that it would wrap everything up in season 4 then have a stupid season 5 (a la Angel).
But now we know that Lost will have 3 more seasons left with 18 episodes each.
Unlike many other mythology/arch-based shows, I think Lost‘s “big question” is much more existential than others. Unlike Twin Peaks where the mysteries revolve around a certain event (“Who killed Laura Palmer?” “Why is Windom Earle back in Twin Peaks?”) or a Big Question like The X-Files (“What is the conspiracy?”), on Lost we want to know about the nature of the lostaways existence.
It’s not just “What is the deal with the polar bears?” or “What is the black smoke?” or “Who are the others?,” what we really want to know about is the reality of the island — is it real? is it a dream? are they dead? etc.
I think this type of story structure, more than others, really needs to have a planned-out ending and cannot go on too long. Yay for giving Lost an end date!
After the Virginia Tech shootings last week a lot of people have been making a big deal of the fact that the guy who purchased the guns had a history of mental illness, and that “people with mental illness shouldn’t be able to buy guns.”
The whole idea of mental illness is still very subjective and so this logic still returns to the fact that people with guns is a bad idea.
Homosexuality was defined as a mental illness until 1973. While nowadays people don’t really accept that and if you ask most people who say “people with mental illness shouldn’t be able to buy guns” (I’m thinking of someone faily liberal like Bill Richardson, who made the comment about mental illness that inspired this post during last night’s debate), they would have no problem with gays buying guns… but that’s because times have changed.
Let’s say some bill is passed and somehow “people with mental illness” cannot buy guns. Now lets say in 50 years or so there is some big religious war and some new religion or who knows what is behind it. Then lets say that a conservative president appoints conservative-minded people to whatever association decides what is and isn’t mentally ill. Next thing you know that association finds some “mental link” between mental illness and religion X.
The point of this is, defining mental illness is very inprecise. It’s a subjective label that might be helpful for doctors and psycologists, but not for making policy decisions.
Look, if I was in charge, I wouldn’t hesitate declaring “bigotry” as a mental illness. Racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. — I honestly and truthfully think that people who hate someone because of some innate trait have mental issues. I also, personally, think that there could be a connection between religion and mental illness. But that’s the thing — who am I to decide?
This whole “people with mental illness shouldn’t buy guns” thing is just an excuse. The problem is guns. While I want to be in favor of any little thing that gets more guns off of the street, I find it hard when the underlying premise is still “Guns are OK.”
My post last night about Soulwax being the best concert ever was written in a somewhat drunken and hasty state. Now that time has passed and I am sober and more lucid, I want to add some additional details (in lazy list form)…
So for the record, I still think that Soulwax was the best concert I’ve been to (next to Daft Punk at Coachella). It wasn’t really the alcohol talking!
I just got back from the Soulwax concert and I have to say that it was probably the best concert I’ve ever been to.
After a “Soulwax Nite Versions” set including “E Talking,” “NY Excuse,” a cover of Tiga’s “Move My Body”,” and others, they did a DJ set that had songs like the Soulwax dub version of Klaxons’ “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Cut Copy’s “Going Nowhere.”
It was amazing and as far as I’m concerned it’s the best non-Coachella concert I’ve ever been to.
I know I just said that I had one favorite argument from the Christopher Hitchens piece, but I forgot the second one that is closer to the end:
For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to “respect” their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon.
(emphasis mine)
Whenever I get all hot-headed and pissed off about conservative politics, I often have more than a few friends say, “Jason, you sound just like they do.” And while this may be true (and I loved it when someone called me an evangelical athiest once), although I may sound like them, in the end I don’t act like them.
Conservatives and the religions behind them want to say, “Jason, as a gay person you cannot married and if we had our way (those damn courts!!), having sex would be illegal and we might even kill you.” I would never do that. While laws outlawing homosexuality are not uncommon or even that “extreme” in today’s politics (a city manager in Largo, Florida was fired for wanting to have a gender-changing operation), I would never think of or suggest that Christianity or any opposite-sex marriages should be outlawed or punishable by the law.
A goal of religion is to create more religious followers. They are always going to be trying to do things to convert people like me. Athiests don’t do that. Sure, I get in a lot of heated and maybe offensive debates with people, but I honestly and truthfully believe the situations are different. Am I wrong?
I’ve never been a fan of Christopher Hitchens. He’s always seemed a little too old-fashioned and conservative to me. While his columns do include far more reflection and arguments I can try to understand than most conservative pieces, he still irks me in the end. I think, “Why, Christopher, do you make so many good points and apparently see the larger picture but still fall-back on old assumptions?”
But now, he might be my new hero? Slate has posted an exclusive except of his new book, God is Not Great.
Originally I was going to cite passages I agreed with, but in the end, I pretty much agree with the whole damn thing.
If, however, I had to pick one thing he says that highlights one of my largest problems with religion, it would be:
There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness.
(emphasis mine)
I really hate the fact that religion makes so many humans feel worthless and petty.
My favorite argument against religion was in one of the many Zizek books I’ve read. He suggests that if God exists, then he is impotent because he requires humans to exist/feel empowered. If God exists and is so great, then why does he need to be reminded by humans on this tiny planet so often. And if some of us humans don’t believe in him, does that really make him feel so bad that he needs to damn us to hell or suggest that his believes kill us? It’s just stupid.
So yeah, as much as it pains me, I think I am going to go ahead and order his book God is Not Great and see what else he says about religion.
I want to say that I hate to admit this, but I’m not sure that I do hate to admit it. Let’s say I have mixed feelings about the outcome of the “Duke Lacrosse Rape Case:” the North Carolina attorney general dropped all charges and so the men involved are all innocent in the eyes of the law.
Without getting into the details of the case or the ethics around how the investigation/charges went, let’s just assume that they were innocent all along.
In light of this whole Don Imus thing (and his torrid past), I couldn’t help but think something along the lines of, I wish there was something like this that could happen to straight white men that might make them (and the country and others like them) realize that racism is an everyday thing for most non-white people in the U.S. and that their white privilege lets them either pretend racism isn’t as bad as people think or that the racists are only people like Strom Thurmond or other really old, bigoted white men, etc.
And then somehow the Duke thing came today.
What these men experienced is somewhat similar to racial profiling, but sort of in reverse. Black men all across the country are accused and charged with committing all sorts of crimes that they likely didn’t commit. We see this everywhere from Driving While Black/Brown to the amount of black (and sometimes innocent) men on death row.
The way I see it, these white Duke players got a taste of what it’s like not to be privileged and white.
The criminal justice system is setup to be biased in all sorts of ways, and this was a perfect example of how it can backfire against anyone.
I just hope that if this case ends up prompting improvements in the way justice is carried out in the U.S. that it doesn’t continue to privilege white men.