Goldberg Variation

Not my favorite song or anything, but a very enjoyable four minutes on a Friday afternoon. Watch to the end!



Now wasn't that fun?

[Via GINANDTACOS]

Bicycle Parking

Tree

More Stairs

Train (2)

Train (1)

Here

Shameful

Nobody's ever mistaken me for a save-the-whales, tree-hugging kind of guy. And really, cleaning up after my dog is about as "activist" as I generally get about the environment.

This, however, is a disgrace:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

I challenge anyone to go look at all these photos (at the link above) and then tell me they feel no sense of shame about what's happening 2000 fucking miles from the nearest continent. Damned if I know why, but this is really bugging me...

[Via: Cynical-C]

Metal

Abstract

Stairs

Hole in the Bucket

Back in my days as an over-aged university student I worked a couple of years in the kitchen of a pub in Halifax. I worked with regular-aged students in pretty shitty conditions for pretty shitty pay. These kids became my friends and, in a very real sense, they became my educators. I'd like to think I taught them a thing or two as well, but who knows?

I learned a bit about rap/hip hop. I heard Spearhead. I didn't know there was a video for this:




More like that, please...

More Common Than You Might Think

Assholum Canadianum:

Canada's immigration minister says he takes "full responsibility" for a citizenship study guide that had all references to gay rights removed.
[...]
Records obtained by The Canadian Press show that an early draft of the guide, meant to prepare immigrants for citizenship tests starting March 15, contained sections citing milestones in gay rights, including decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969 and the same-sex marriage law of 2005.
But Kenney's office ordered those sections removed from the draft, and rebuffed an effort by bureaucrats to have them re-inserted last August. The new guide was released with fanfare in November.

The Canadian conservative: an asshole by any other name, eh?

Mask

Iggy Pop is one of those rock 'n' rollers who doesn't suck even when he sucks. Maybe he's the only one, I don't know. Tonight is the first time I've seen this performance Iggy did on The Letterman Show. It looks relatively recent. Letterman and Iggy must be contemporaries, eh? Hard to believe. It gets a bit surreal when Iggy heads out towards the audience. I think they were scared by his "frat boy" reference. This one definitely does not suck...


Iggy golfs...

Rice Krispies

Heh, yeah, why not?


Breakfast of champions...

Wood and Concrete

Vacant Lot, After the Rain

Neruda

A couple of days ago I posted an unattributed snippet from Pat Robertson's latest hate-infused drivel (this time directed against the victims of the recent earthquake in Chile), and asked readers to identify the speaker of the quoted passage. I'm not surprised at all that Dave had no trouble recognizing that particular spew as belonging to Pat Robertson. Dave is located in New Orleans, and the good people of that fine city were also accused by Robertson of incurring God's wrath and themselves being to blame for the destruction of their city. That Pat Robertson is one fine Christian, ain't he?

Anyway, as the winner (if that's what it can be called) of my little contest, Dave was more or less forced (he's a polite guy) into picking a topic for me to write about. He could make me write about anything. He went further than was necessary and provided me with a list of topics from which to choose:

Ooh, wait, let me think about this for a minute. So many possibilities... Comic books? Mosh pit etiquette? The poetry of Pablo Neruda? Baboon mating rituals? Your favorite movie? Best concert you've ever seen? Grossest thing you've ever eaten? Stamp collecting?
I can't decide, so I'm going to let you pick one from that list. Or any combination of three.

Look at that list, remember Robertson's quote, and you can see that Dave is a pretty clever guy. I'm clever too, Dave! Given the context, one of those topics is clearly more appropriate than the others...

--------------------

Pat Robertson's birth was no different than the birth of millions of baboons before him. As dictated by traditional baboon mating rituals...

Haha!! Just kidding!

--------------------

Having spent more than a few years hanging around universities, I had heard of Pablo Neruda. But really, that's about it. A name. It wasn't until earlier today that I actually found out a little bit about Neruda and read a bit of his poetry for the first time. (I don't dislike poetry or anything like that, I just never seem to get around to reading much of it.) Too bad for me, as it turns out, because from the few poems I've read today I think I quite like where this Neruda guy is coming from.

I don't imagine anything I have to say about Neruda will be especially interesting to anyone already familiar with the man and his work, but...

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

--Pablo Neruda, "A Dog Has Died"

Look at the above passage... A guy's dog has died. He's buried the dog. He misses the dog. We've all heard songs, read stories and poems, seen TV shows, etc. about this sort of thing. But it's all maudlin crap compared to what Neruda does with it in a few short verses. Some day, he writes, he'll join his dead dog--in the ground, next to the "rusted old machine." The "materialist" doesn't believe in any heaven for himself, but he does believe there's a heaven for dogs, all waiting patiently for their masters to join them. One presumes they'll be waiting until the end of time itself, for at the end of the poem he writes "So now he's gone and I buried him,/and that's all there is to it." The notion of an atheist who believes in a heaven for dogs is, to my mind, only strange if you don't understand what exactly being an atheist entails.

The idea of death is at the core of the few poems I read today. Here's a couple of passages from "Nothing But Death" (I guess the title is a big hint!):

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

That's some serious imagery there, folks. "We die going into ourselves." From darkness into darkness... Later,

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

Silence, emptiness, nothingness. Later in the poem, "...the face of death is green,/and the look death gives is green," it belongs to the earth; death is everywhere in everything; death is the final destination. (Do you hear, Pat Robertson, you useless piece of shit? The only thing waiting for you when you die is a fucking hole in the ground.) This kind of stuff might seem depressing to some. Grow up.

At this point I'm going to abandon any effort at "explaining" or "analyzing" Neruda's poems, because I don't see that it's necessary. They are what they are and they communicate so directly to me that I just feel like I'm reading the things back to you, the reader of this post. I'm also worried about the translations I've been quoting. I have no idea if they're trustworthy or not. I'm glad that Dave picked this topic, even though I haven't really done it any justice.

Boxes and Pipes

Imaginary Album

Since I haven't had an idea of my own for a while now, I thought it might be fun to do another imaginary album. (Explanation/rules/etc. at the link.)

Here's Learning from Failure by Peltularia.

Original Photo

• Style: According to drummer/lead vocalist/primary songwriter Elmo Bliss, Peltularia's sound varies between early krautrock with heavier drums and English lyrics, and Carpenters infused grindcore. Joe Slobizkowitz, reviewing their last album in Rolling Stone, opined that Peltularia reminded him of "nothing more or less than the hammer of Thor pulverizing a big pile of cooked spaghetti".

• Influences: Kraftwerk, Can, The Carpenters, Napalm Death, Sepultura, Gong

• Lyric: Machine men have only just begun/To live on the Autobahn/'Cause just like me/They all wanna be on top of the world (from "Machine Men Close to the Autobahn on Top of the World")

• Quote: (From guitarist Lars Vindaloo) "On our next album I'm going for a sound something like Yngwie Malmsteen playing like Keith Richards if he had taken lessons from Yngwie Malmsteen."

• What Lester Bangs would say if he were still alive: Is that fuckin' chicken!? Where the fuck is my copy of Hot Rocks?