NPR revived an old radio series called This I Believe. The show invites celebrities and ordinary people to share essays about their beliefs and things that are important to them. In this week’s installment Wayne Coyne (singer and guitarist for The Flaming Lips) talks about Creating Our Own Happiness and talks about the eleven years he spent working as a fry cook at Long John Silvers.
Archive for February 2007
Happy Presidents’ Day!
Let’s face it… sometimes you just need rock out to some awesome progressive rock bands like Yes, Rush, and King Crimson for say… 48 hours straight. For those special times I offer up Aural Moon. This internet radio station rules and they will even play requests that you make on their forum. You can also check out their Moonie Map to see where people are tuning in from (yeh, a lot of them are in the Bay Area). Genesis, Kansas, maybe, but I bet you’ll never hear anything off Felona e Soronaby by Italian prog-rockers Le Orme on your local soft rock station.
Nate Harrison produced this great 18 minute documentary about the history of the “Amen break“, a 6 second drum loop that has been used in everything from N.W.A. songs to Jeep commercials and forms the basis of entire music genres like jungle and drum ‘n bass. The documentary also touches on the political issues surrounding copyright laws and sample-based music, with quotes by Lawrence Lessig.
This was originally part of a 2004 art installation called Can I Get An Amen?. Nate Harrison also has another interesting piece called Bassline Baseline that traces the history of the Ronald TB-303 bass synthesizer.
A few weeks ago we went crazy with the scanning gun at Babies”R”Us and put a bunch of stuff on a registry for little Claudia. She’s due on March 21st. We probably aren’t going to do a traditional baby shower since all of the relatives are out of town, so if anyone out there is feeling generous, check out our registry online or at the store and send us some adorable goodies. The registry number is 34423872.
A few weeks back Leon mentioned that UC Berkeley is posting a ton of their class lectures as podcasts. They date back several semesters and there’s a pretty wide range of topics. You can also get reading lists and other information off the course web-sites. I’ve started listening to Introduction to Statistics, Existentialism in Literature and Film, and Foundations of American Cyber-Cultures and I’ve gotten through two or three of each so far.
The statistics class by Fletcher Hank Ibser might help me with some of the things I run into at work and Christine already had a copy of the big, fancy, $100+, text book, so I thought I’d check it out. It can be a little hard to listen to at times because the lecturer references diagrams on the blackboard, but if I have the book open it isn’t a problem since he is following it pretty closely.
Existentialism is my favorite of the three. It’s taught by Hubert Dreyfus and he plans to take us through writings of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. I knew they were all big influences on a lot of the artists I learned about in school, but I never took the time to learn much about them. Professor Dreyfus is fun to listen to and has a great presentation style. We’ve started out with Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and he warned that it is the hardest book in the course.
Foundations of American Cyber-Cultures was offered through the art department and it’s a lot of fun. Greg Niemeyer talks about the history of information technology, human-machine relationships, and their representations in art and literature. So far he has talked about things ranging from the completion the transcontinental railroad to a dramatic scene in Tron. It’s great stuff, but a part of the class involves getting the students to build web-sites. I’ll probably skip out on that part since I get a fair share of that in my daily routine.
In addition to all of that heady stuff I’m also reading The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin. Hopefully some of these things will stick and my brain wouldn’t turn to mush. Fortunately all of the podcasts are free and I don’t get graded on anything, so I can slack off if I want. The Birth Partner book is going to have a big test at the end. I guess I better start making flash cards.
This is a wild video of a French, industrial design student named Jean-Yves Blondeau who has created a suit covered in wheels and mastered cruising around in it. It’s set to a song by Daft Punk.
I heard about Fast Food Nation a while back, but it wasn’t until I heard Eric Schlosser giving an interview making the connection between the rise of the fast food industry, suburban sprawl, and government subsidies that I became interested in reading the book. The book is incredibly well written, telling the stories of individual people and detailing the fast food industry’s history, business models, and connections to culture.
The book has been rightly compared to Sinclair’s The Jungle. The most horrifying parts of the book describe the conditions of the workers in the beef industry and the chain of events preceding the fast food hamburger. In the beef packing industry, people are still needed in order to navigate the cow corpse through the process, and probably even worse, to clean the machinery and facility. Schlosser tells stories of people who have suffered from dehabilitating injuries and people who have been killed while working. The conditions seem unimaginably disgusting and unsafe, and the managers seem to view the consequences as prices of doing business rather than as taking away peoples’ bodies and lives.
On the other side of the machinery, the farming practices are touched upon. Chickens are fed cow parts, cows are fed chicken parts, chicken waste, and parts of other cows. Cows are fed cats and dogs from the pound (yes, you read that correctly – I think there is now supposed to be some standard in place so that this does not happen anymore). The size of chickens is able to be standardized to the point where the butchering process can be automated. A single fast food hamburger contains meat from hundreds of different cows.
While all of this goes on behind the scenes, fast food restaurants spend billions on advertising and marketing to fill an imagined niche in the lives of the customers. The happy meal toys, the playlands, the good tasting (apparently, most people think it tastes good), cheap and convenient food provide a service that people like. Parents show their children love by taking them to fast food restaurants. I remember in the 90s when McDonald’s switched from polystyrene packaging to paper packaging because of all the flack they got from environmentalists. But they only made that change in the U.S. and places that showed concern for the material. They did not make an ethical decision to make the change globally. They made a business decision to make the change in places where it might affect their profits.
And then comes the question, are these people evil or just good business people? The book certainly shows how they are good business people. The book points out a lot of things that might also lead you to believe that they are evil. Who would knowingly cause such harm on workers and consumers just to make a little money? Then again, people need to eat, and there are a lot of people to feed today. Maybe they are providing a beneficial service by feeding so many people efficiently?
My vegetarian ivory tower of Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, and organic farmer’s market vegetables is probably just as much, or almost as much, industrialized, and is certainly full of fluffy, feel good marketing. I might feel happy buying an organic orange at Whole Foods while hearing INXS play through the speakers, but when I eat it and there are no seeds, I wonder what is wrong. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, will be speaking at Berkeley on February 27th.
You don’t have to be a classical music geek to be amused by Rob Paravonian’s rant about Pachelbel’s Canon in D, but it doesn’t hurt.
On Saturday we went to see a performance by The Bruce McCulloch Project at the Eureka Theatre over by the Embarcadero in San Francisco. The show was part of the SF Sketchfest Comedy Festival. Bruce McColloch is most famous as a the “little guy” from the Canadian comedy group The Kids in the Hall. The show was standing room only and we showed up half way through the opening act by another Canadian group called The 30 Cent Players. The staff found Christine a seat, but I wound up standing through both acts. I thought the 30 Cent Players were pretty funny and that their funniest bit was a dance routine to Guns and Roses’ November Rain.
After the intermission Bruce McCulloch’s group came on. Bruce had a group of younger performers with him who made fun of his age and relevance, asking if he was on of the guys from Hee Haw (instead of Kids in the Hall). We saw the original, Kids in the Hall group perform skits from their television show a few years back, but this was all new material. I really felt that it was very tailored for the audience. At the beginning of the set they acted out a pre-show, planning meeting, going over all the themes that they thought San Franciscans could relate to (anxieties about student loan debt, starting a family, real estate, and failed screenwriting careers). This seemed like a way to deconstruct the performance. They went on to bring back the themes throughout the skits, in big, obvious ways that poked fun at the comedy process.
Bruce did a monologue where he fantasized about the relationship that he would have with Nicole Richie where he ordered her to loose more weight and talked about how she would eventually give birth to a tiny, perfect, cell phone. We also really liked the song and dance number describing the various dancing styles of high school students in the 1980s, with a reference to the euro-pop group Book of Love. Several of the acts were accompanied by a live guitar player. For the finale all of actors came out wearing full wedding dresses and each described why they wear their dresses all day, everyday, getting at some of the strange psychoses that people have relating to marriage and its symbols. One of my favorite quotes was “I wear my wedding dress for the woman sitting alone in a cafe, drinking a glass of wine, reading Fountainhead, wishing ‘Damn, why can’t I order just a half glass of wine?’.
The show was great and there were a ton of other shows in the festival that I would have also loved to see like Paul Reubens, David Cross, and the Upright Citizens Brigade. Scott Thompson (also of Kids in the Hall) was sitting close to us just hanging out. I’m sure they will have some more cool people next year.