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Herzog on Waldo

If you've ever seen Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, or any other of Werner Herzog's documentaries, his irritating voice-over narration may either make you ponder about life's depths or make you want to cover your ears. Here's a spoof:

Guster!

Describing Guster is a difficult task. The group with 3 core members who met in university can be called a college band, an alternative rock band, but that categorizes them with much much less worthy bands.

With most indie-type bands I can tell you the story of how I "discovered" them but with Guster I totally forget. I know it was during the last few years of high school though.

A few nights ago I went to the Phoenix concert theatre in Toronto (a venue I dislike very much) expecting to hear some good ol' songs. Well, it turned out to be one of the top 5 concerts I've ever been to. The best concerts plaster a smile to my face and at the end of this one I had a huge grin and was skipping down the street to the subway station.

In another post I mentioned that concerts aren't just for hearing music - if I wanted that I could just listen to it at home or on an ipod (and, in the case of bad artists, I wouldn't have to put up with off-key singing either) - they have to be entertaining. Let me list the things that Guster performed to entertain:

1. They had a guy come out in a hot dog costume in the middle of the thing.
2. They didn't bother with an encore the first time. Adam Gardner said something along the lines of "Goodnight!" signifying that the concert was over. He then turned his back to the crowd, then turned around again and said into the mic, "Okay, we're back."
3. The harmonic singing. Wow, it's so refreshing to not hear only one voice.
4. Luke Reynolds recently joined the band, so a whole crowd shouting 'Luke!' sounded like 'Boo!' (Adam Gardner pointed this out)
5. Brian (the drummer's) perfectly horrible rendition of Under the Bridge as a final encore.
6. The switching of many guitars. Banjos. Trumpets.
7. Brian plays crazy drums with his hands.
8. The crowd. There were some really excited fans. The last two concerts I went to there, the crowd was really snobby (it was probably because of the artists who were playing there). Since Guster have been around for quite a while, there was a good mixture of old and young fans.

I didn't take any photos or videos but I'm sure you can search for them :)

The Lord of the Rings revisited

When the first LOTR movie came out I was, oh, in grade 8. People who didn't usually read started reading the whole series of books in a few days. I tried The Hobbit and gave up. But I loved the first movie, and I loved the second movie for the trailer. Then, after finishing the last movie I forgot about it. To this date I've only read The Hobbit and the first book.

Now my cousin is a huge fan of the movies and the story and can explain everything. So when I was at her house we re-watched the first and second movies and as she was getting more and more passionate about the universe I wondered why I felt that the movies are great, awesome, but still I do not LOVE the movies.

The ways in which I like the LOTR movies very much:
-the music. at the time I wanted to be a composer and this score convinced me more than ever. kudos to James Horner
-the trailer for the Two Towers. I lost count of the number of times I watched it
-the scenery - beautiful. i love the different worlds.
-the ensemble cast

The ways in which I cannot say I love the LOTR movies:
-to the uninitiated, there's too much happening at once, too many worlds to explore, too many things that are 'given' or 'taken for granted'. For example, in The Two Towers we see Kings and Princes and Princesses appear and we have to take for granted that these people are powerful.
-other than the love story between Arwen and Aragorn, nothing is personal. the plot is just too epic, too wide of scope in that we are dealing with whole kingdoms being massacred. do I care that Rohan is doomed? no. why not? i don't know any of the citizens 'personally'. they show a couple of clips where the villagers are fleeing, are fighting, but they become one big blur.
-the characters border on stereotypical. none of the characters are fleshed out, not even the main ones. it's true that throughout the trilogy, we experience the good times and the bad with the characters. through showing and not simply telling, we get to see that Aragorn is brave and noble, that Frodo is innocent, that Ringwraiths are evil and so on. But once we determine an adjective to stick onto a character they remain that way to the end.

This revolution may be postmodernized

Yesterday I went to an Amnesty International meeting in which one of the workshops I attended was "Middle East and North Africa Uprising: Conversation with AIUSA Experts". Many times they mentioned that technology such as Twitter and Facebook was to Mubarak as poison may have been to Nasser, but that the revolution did not start with technology; it started with hope. Hope, and an idea, and that youth were tired of waiting and didn't yet know how to be afraid. So where did this idea come from?

The experts also mentioned that this revolution was not like other ones before - there was no Mandela, no Ghandi, no one leader, because "they were all leaders". How did this happen?
A hypothesis started forming in my mind, that even though Adbusters published a few issues back that postmodernism's time has passed, this revolution is very much postmodern.

Postmodernism started, in the West anyway, with Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead, that there is no longer only one religious truth. Then there's Barthes' Death of the Author, another postmodern proclamation in which he pronounces that there is no one driving force behind any text. Similarly, the revolutions in North Africa can be interpreted in this light: death of the leader. There leader has not disappeared; rather, the leader has pluralized into multitudes.

Why do I always get into these situations?

I've been trying to decide whether Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is an utter load of drivel or is a bold statement on the nature of art and will enhance my life.

This book was my first online purchase experience. I bought it with Chapters gift cards, when I wasn't even old enough for a credit card. I bought it because I was in an Ellis-Ballard-Palahniuk phase and I'd seen favourable reviews of the book on Amazon.com. Sure, I was up for a challenge. It arrived in my mailbox, fresh, I ripped open the box, looked the cover over, then stored the book on my bookshelf until 2009. I was living by myself in 2009 and had nothing better else to do than to read after work (I had no Internet, either). So I started and grudgingly got to page 130 after having read some interesting things. Then I put the book down until now, in 2011. I picked it up again today and with more than 400 pages to go I don't know when or if I will be able to finish it...which now that I'm reading other reviews seems to be the point of the book. Great, Danielewski! You've done your job! You've made your point known! Spare me!

Further Study?

So here I am at my parent's place right now, practically jobless and lounging around the house. Not the best position in the world. A lot of people are asking me when I'll look for a job, or what I'm going to study for my master's degree. I don't want a job until I know I can make a difference doing the stuff and enjoy it, and for my master's I still want to study too many things is the problem. My dream would be to complete a triple Masters degree in audiology-cinema-international development/affairs. The first would be for employability of an in-demand job, the second because I have a burning desire to complete a degree in it and I feel like I could analyze films for so long, and the third because I have a growing interest in the field. I really just can't choose one field! Even my undergrad degree had me studying many different domains. I feel paralyzed.