a two month round-up: the five-star recommendations

(May 6- July 10)

Films:

Solaris (original)
Delicatessen
The Proposition
Traffic
La Haine
Shotgun Stories
Let the Right One In
Badlands
Chinatown
Amores Perros
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Books:

Life of Pi
Genesis
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Poems of Charles Simic
Poems of Charles Bukowski

Music:

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion
mewithoutYou: it's all crazy! it's all false! it's all a dream! it's alright!
Lead Belly: Last Sessions
Dan Deacon: Bromst

captain

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fat jesus

here's a great introductory piece to one of my favorite people, Zach Galifianakis. even though every film or tv show he's been in has been awful (i haven't seen The Hangover), he really is a comedic genius. if you ever want to catch his stand up, go for his dvd Live at the Purple Onion.

plus, check out that beard. beautiful.

well

it's been a while since the last update. currently i am

- unemployed
- covering songs on the ukulele
- doing the poetry thing
- spending time with the white stone students
- beginning the preliminary research for my senior thesis "Examining the inherent commonalities between conventional Anarchistic thought and the Christian religion"
- a bum
- reading whatever i can find
- going through foreign films before the 1980s
- hanging out in the public library

that's my life right now. i just fixed my bike tire, so who knows where the week will take me.

Big Girls Don't Cry

Don't ya just loooooooooooove that song?

The 25 Lessons of Nonviolence

The following list is from Mark Kurlansky’s Non-violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. While I think I need to know the context of some of the statements, I am intrigued. What do you think?

1). There is no proactive word for nonviolence.
2). Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
3). Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
4). Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
5). A rebel [especially of the nonviolent sort] can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
6). Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
7). A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
8). People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
9). A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
10). The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
11). The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
12). The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
13). It is often no the largest but the best organized and most articulate group the prevails.
14). All debate momentarily ends with an “enforced silence” once the first shots are fired.
15). A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
16). Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
17). Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
18). People motivated by fear do not act well.
19). While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
20). Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
21). Once you start the business of killing, you just get “deeper and deeper,” without limits.
22). Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation–which is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.
23). Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
24). The miracle is that despite all of society’s promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
25). The hard world of beginning a movement to end war has already begun.

Brother Sport

Peoplez.

For real.

Listen to Brother Sport.

It is from the new Animal Collective album due in late January, called Merriweather Post Pavilion

th'end