putting the j in jjosh

Thanks to a suggestion found on Dan R’s movie blog, I recently caught the Herzog documentary, Wheel of Time. It was a spectacular experience, and there were many highlights and mind-boggling points contained within the film. From the known — the intricate sand manadala that is then destroyed — to the relatively unknown — giant cauldrons of tea being made to serve groups of monks — Herzog dives into the sequestered world of Tibetan Buddhism and shows it with a curiosity that is equal parts joy and wonder.

Some of my favorite parts of the film are when Herzog is interviewing the Dalai Lama…there’s a great bit where they’re cracking each other up that goes like this:

DALAI LAMA: There is the question of whether Mount Kilosh is the center of the universe. That I don’t know. (laughs) Each country believes that their country is the center of the whole universe. I think that’s very true. I think ultimately, we our own self, each individual, that is the center of the universe.

So for me, this place is the center of the universe because the concept of the whole universe comes from here (gestures towards himself). Therefore I’m the center of the universe. Similarly, in your case, you are the center of the whole universe.

HERZOG: Thank you, it makes me feel very good. I shouldn’t tell my wife.

Much of the film takes place at a large Buddhist gathering that happens every two years where the Dalai Lama initiates monks in some special ceremony that takes days to perform. Thousands and thousands of monks travel to get to this gathering, some coming from hundreds of miles away. This staggering clip gives you a sense of the devotion on display here…it is a big clip, but well worth the loading time…

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This is the best doc I have seen in a long time. Highly recommended.

A man has saved a bear from drowning. Article here.

This is how the web works. Dana Desko — who has a pretty badass blog of his own — shoots me a link to the ultra-modern new site for design firm Modernista. It’s amazing, all meta and web 2.0 and so on, check it out, it’s really smart, if a little tough to figure out. From there I check their work on youtube. Turns out they did a music video, "Window in the Skies", for U2, which is pretty darn amazing. It came out in 2006, but I’ve never heard of the song, or seen this video. There’s something about that fluid feeling of clicking links, moving seamlessly from one idea to the next and then suddenly arriving at the sublime…it’s a feeling only made possible by the net…

I wonder if future artists will find a way to use that feeling to really move us, the way a book or a film or a poem or a painting can. Perhaps we’re still analagous to the era when films were just movies of plays.

Well, until then, at least we’ve got U2.

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I mean really, only a band like U2 could afford to license all that, right? It’s cool that they went ahead and did it though.

Why do I like musicals? Is it simply because my parents bombarded my sister and I with soundtracks to Cats, Les Miz and a dozen Gilbert & Sullivans? Is it something bigger, like my general love for old-timey things, or the nostalgia for an age before I was born? Does it have to do with the innocence that musicals have, the general tone of joy that fills acting when it has to break into song?

Whatever the reason, if it’s a good musical, I’m into it. When it was fleet week a little while back, every time I saw a sailor in manhattan, I thought he was gonna break into a tune from On the Town. Sometime i wanna go out in New York, and do like that On the Town poster says: "Paint the town with joy!"

Now don’t get me wrong, I won’t like a film JUST because it’s a musical, it has to be good as well. And just like there are relatively few good dramas, or comedies, or action films, there are relatively few good film musicals. But c’mon, you can’t knock Singin’ In the Rain, West Side Story, Les Miz, or Sweeney Todd (that Depp/Burton one was great!)…

Tonight in the park across from our house they’re going to be doing a sort of Screen on the Green thing where they will show 1776, a two and a half hour musical about the founding fathers. One of them is played by that guy who was in Magnum and is the voice of K.I.T.T. on Knight Rider. Maxine was all set to come see the film until she heard what it was going to be, and I have to say, I don’t blame her — if you’re not into musicals at all, this doesn’t sound like it would be a good time.

But I thought you should get a little taste of it to see what you think…I’ve never seen it, so I can’t wait…in case you hate musicals I’ve spared you the singing in this clip…and it’s short…

Maxine can’t believe that I’m posting this at all…wants to go on the record that she thinks it is "boring as hell."

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 This month’s banner is a fantastic mural done on the boards surrounding a construction site near our apartment. We walk past it every Saturday, and one morning the artist herself was there working on it. She was really nice, and explained that she got quite a few commissions to do construction sites because normally they’re such an eyesore that they create quite a lot of tension in the community.

She’s got a deal where she gets to keep the art after the site is finished. You can check more of her work at her website, which is full of interesting stuff. She also told us the story of this mural, which was originally going to be flowers (I think that’s what she said), but which changed once she met and started talking to a fellow who lived nearby. He told her the history of the site, that it was the site of The Battle of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War. So she changed the mural to fit this new theme.

I have to say, I love how surreal it is. The first time I saw it, I wanted to get a picture of it for the blog banner, and I was just lucky enough that when I finally got around to biking down there to get the photo, I took it when that guy was zipping along the street. Nothing like a bit of luck.

Sometimes for her job my sister has to visit farms…and sometimes they load her up with free produce….today she stopped by and dropped off a big box of zuchhini, mexican zuchhini(?!), basil and squash flowers. Squash flowers are apparently really delicate, and there’s not really any way to store them, so you don’t find them in the supermarket or in restaurants.

I found a recipe online for squash flowers stuffed with cheese and basil, then fried in a batter made with beer and flour. The squash flowers were so weird. The first thing you have to do is open them up, pull out the stamens inside, and make sure there aren’t any bugs. And there were lots of bugs, lemme tell you.

So we cleaned them, stuffed them with a mixture of cream cheese, basil, sour cream and grated gruyere. Then made the batter, dipped them in and fried them in a pan. It was a lot of work, but they tasted pretty delicious.

Then again, I kind of feel like you could take shoe leather, fill it with cream cheese and sour cream, fry it, and it would be delicious, don’t you think? On a couple of them the filling leaked out as they were frying, and those flowers had the flavor of the flower come through a little more. Pretty delicious. Maxine documented the whole delicious experience.

Afternoon Go-kart Grand Prix…Roscoe desperately tries to overtake Capo for the lead. Which he will do. And keep the lead for the rest of the day. Jerk.

The bachelor gets a free shoe-shine from DC latenite institution, Bigleg.

A random woman gives the bachelor some dancing love as the el-wire sign is hoisted and shown to the crowd. The faux zebra trim of the pimp hat is just visible below the sign’s foil backing. The bachelor’s hand appears to be moving towards the random woman’s chest, but this is actually just a smoov dance move.

There’s a proliferation these days of music videos that fairly grab you by the lapels and scream "look how clever! forward on to all of your friends!! post it on your blog!! now!!!" And while it often comes off as a blatant marketing move, when it’s done with style, and actually is, you know, clever, I have to appreciate it. And then, you know (again), forward it on to all my friends. Or post it on my blog.

This video, Naive New Beaters "Live Good", comes from a metafilter post, and the comments on it hint at both sides of this equation — from "how neat!" to "I’m so tired of this kind of crap." Many metafilterites hate the song, and I will say watching it without the audio is just as effective (though maybe not for the band).

Much as our parents’ generation derided the effect that MTV had on editing (faster cuts, more eye candy, louder), I can imagine a future in which we deride the way artworks become more and more "look at me!!!" in an attempt to stand out on a crowded playing field. And the kids of today will all say "are you kidding? that’s what makes it awesome!" Or whatever they say instead of "awesome". Maybe the new word will be "grandiose".

"That’s what makes it grandiose, yo!"

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Is this another example of a stupid human trick on youtube?

Or another example of how the contemporary urban environment is now constantly being re-contextualized for fun fun fun.

Something to think about.

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Much like the hi-5 video from a while back, this takes a (not so) simple idea and sees how far it can go…

For some reason this vid makes me feel good about life.

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I recently saw the excellent film by Penelope Spheris, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II. Part I was a documentary about the early LA punk scene, and it was unbelievably good. Hunt it down, the performances are stunning and seeing burnt-up stars like Darby Crash at their zenith is so energizing. Great great film.

Part II takes a look at the 1988 metal scene in LA. It’s a lot funnier than Part I, because hair metal is just naturally more hilarious than raw punk. Poison have become big stars, Ace Frehley of KISS is interviewed on a bed full of girls, everyone talks about how intensely they’re into drinks, drugs and sex, Aerosmith talk like they’re the biggest thing ever. Guns n Roses get a random mention at one point, but it’s in the context of all the bands currently playing LA trying to make it big.

And that’s one of the most poignant aspects of this doc — that there are so many bands profiled or mentioned who are so determined to make it big, and now, with the hindsight of history, we know that they won’t. Where are these folks now? There’s a sadness, and an irony, but also a strange sense of maturity that comes from seeing so many bands play out variations on this conversation:

PENELOPE: So what if you don’t make it?

BAND: That’s not an option. I will make it. There’s no alternative.

Maturity because I think, well, they didn’t make it, so they must have had to change that dream, or realize that the exuberance of youth is sometimes not enough to make the dream come true. You also need a healthy amount of luck. Rock is for the young, as others have been noting.

I wanted to show one of the bands so you could get a sense of what I’m talking about. For a bunch of reasons I chose this band called Odin. They seem to have it all, poised to break big. They’ve got the look, the girls, the Budweisers in the hot tub, the awesome old-school manager in a suit, oh yeah, and the ASSLESS CHAPS. The only problem is that their music is terrible…

…but somehow it’s still fun to watch them.

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Penelope Spheeris would go on to direct Wayne’s World, Beverly Hillbillies, Black Sheep and many other weak films.

It is now summer. Let us celebrate in two ways:

First, by song,

(yo la tengo – the summer)

and then, by poem (this poem is amazing! the ending is so fierce!):

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver   

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung

herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating

sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws

back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with

her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale

forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings

open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what

a prayer is.

I do know how to pay

attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to

kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and

blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been

doing all day.

Tell me, what else should

I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at

last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you

plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Down in Nashville, TN, Maxine and I interviewing Native Alaskans about incredibly expensive guitars.

1940 Martin guitar

Yes, the Red Hook, Brooklyn Ikea opens on Wednesday, in two days’ time.

Yes, they’re doing some crazy promotion thing where the first 35 people in the store will get a free couch.

Yes, there are already people camping out in line.

I camped out once at RFK for Grateful Dead tickets in 1993 (I think it was ’93…Traffic was the opening act, so JW what year was that?). I knew a lot of people going to the show (and to camp out), and I figured I should experience the fabled Dead show at least once before Jerry died. Camping out was a lot of fun, almost a party unto itself, with various parking-lot shenanigans and goings on. I didn’t sleep much and the next day while driving home I had to repeatedly slap myself in the face to stay awake.

If you’re curious about the shenanigans and goings on at the Ikea camp out, racked.com is live-blogging from the line; they’ve got an embedded blogger who’s fifth in line.

It may be overstating the obvious, but these people must really really really want an Ikea couch.

UPDATE – from one of my favorite blogs of the moment: "Red Hook Blacks Line Up To Rob First 100 IKEA Customers."