lovehatethings

Below is my summer "bucket list" - i.e. things to do before summer kicks the bucket.

• Think of a better name for this list than "bucket list"
• Get back to Las Vegas and find a way to break the bank and come home with enough money to fund a winter trip to Vegas.
• Spend ample time deciding whether I should get an iPhone.
• Reassure myself that my decision to not buy a BluRay DVD player is completely justified because the cost is still too high for its own good, and even though I own a couple hundred DVDs, I never watch them.
• Try to regain the same blogging output that I had last summer when lovehatethings first started. (Two weeks until the first anniversary!)
• Try to encourage more of friends that Twitter is about way too much more than lifestreaming for them to use that as an excuse to stay away.
• Catch up on the latest seasons of Weeds, Burn Notice, Ashes to Ashes, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and True Blood.
• Go to see some late night movies... I wish they started at midnight - 10:30 is too early for this night owl.
• Get on the ball and reserve a night for my 3rd annual Backyard Film Festival.
• Book a gig so that my gracious friends who keep asking me to play are kept happy for another six months.
• Find a cheap source of watermelons. Those things are like crack in the summer; gotta have my fix.
• Play some poker with friends and at the closest casino.
• Try at least five local restaurants I've never checked out.
• Do at least one day of buying rush tickets for Stratford and checking out a couple of plays.
• Find things that really piss me off... it helps the podcast rants so much.
• Start to write the Great American novel and then give up in a violent fit having drowned myself in a sea of bourbon.
• Start to read Finnegan's Wake... and then give up in a violent fit having drowned myself in a sea of bourbon.
• Do annual summer viewings of Dazed and Confused, Almost Famous, Big Fish, a Kevin Smith marathon, and, if the moment moves me, a John Hughes marathon.
• And last, but not least, read the books that have been gathering dust on the shelves for far too long.

I'm going autobiographical on one of the most embarrassing, yet most genuinely enjoyable aspects of my life. I don't expect people to understand, but maybe it's something that everyone can relate to - at least on some level.

In exploring the archetypes of any media (and especially entertainment media) I like to think that there are fairly common standards in which my emotions are tugged at for enjoyment's sake. Though the paradigm can be exercised in many ways, depending on the medium, I like to simplify the pattern by commonly calling it "Tension and Release".

In music, tension and release can occur in many ways. Sometimes it's a musician simply playing with volume. Think of the grunge standard of the quiet verse followed by the loud chorus ala Smells Like Teen Spirit or Creep. While these examples are very basic approaches to tension and release (T&R) volume, made effective by immediate contrast, slow builds culminating in auditory climaxes have been around from early drumming to classical to jazz to rock. But music also allows for T&R through harmony and dissonance, varying speeds, rhythmic complexity and simplicity, and varying tonal densities. How many people have had cerebral orgasms upon hearing the cutting single guitar bend that breaks through repetitive vamp of a chord progression?

The basic concepts of T&R extend to novels, films, poetry, visual arts, and basically any other sensory media. It's why the action film often inserts comic relief. 120 minutes of non-stop action eventually becomes wallpaper without contrast in the same way that thrash metal bands have to consider some sense of dynamics if they don't wish to become redundant.

So, I ask myself the question. If most (maybe all) of enjoyable entertainment consumption contains T&R, where does paradigm fit, if at all, with Social Media or Networking. While set pieces like songs, films, and novels have, at their core, a sense of time constraint that contributes to the anticipatory set that one comes to the medium with, what which set do we approach Social Media?

The problems that arise in applying such parameters (and I'll fully admit the marriage of this paradigm may seem forced with SM) lie in the multi-pronged creative approach to the content output. It's kind of like a freeform jazz odyssey with musicians from virtuoso's to drunken karaoke performers. But I think the tools have offered some parallels that help to form the T&R of Social Media.

Twitter is the noisy, fast, guitar solo full of notes that run the gamut of multi-octave scales. Facebook is the dissonant amalgam of everything we want and don't want at the same time. Seesmic is the sample ripped from another artist and dropped in to the pastiche of sound. Youtube is the brief respite leaving the cacophony of sound behind for a time... well, to be replaced by other sound anyway. And blogs are the deep sweeping textures and swaths of sound that allow us to escape for periods of time and consume by... reading. How can all of these content creators possibly orchestrate anything so intentional as an artisitic process like T&R? They don't - you do.

In the ultimate vindication of "reader response" theories, we inherently mix or consumption to achieve appropriate T&R. I could just use Twitter all day or watch Youtube clips or sift through pictures of people's kids in Facebook. I can, however, mix and match, often by instinct to achieve the ebb and flow that best suit my sensibility. Because like anything, there is an "artistic" component if you fly high enough or zoom in enough.

And if you haven't bought any of this, consider the experience of reading it nothing more than the the long sustained notes of a Klaus Schulze composition or the outer movements of Shine On You Crazy Diamond. You may now return to the metal solo.

Abbreviation (Russian)

NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT

Laboratory for Shuttering, Reinforcement, Concrete and Ferroconcrete Operations for Composite-monolithic and Monolithic Constructions of the Department of Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.

Longest Baseball Throw

Glen Gorbous, a Canadian minor leaguer, who had a three year stint in the Majors from 1955 - 1957 still holds the record. In 1957, after a running start, the ball left his arm at an estimated 120 MPH and it flew and flew and flew. After all was said and done the baseball covered a total of 445 feet 10 inches before hitting the ground and breaking the old record by a whole nine inches.

Job Title 

"temporary part-time libraries North-West inter-library loan business unit administration assistant."

Song Title - Christine Lavin

Regretting what I said to you when you called me at 11:00 on Friday morning to tell me that 1:00 Friday afternoon you were gonna leave your office, go downstairs, hail a cab, to go out to the airport, to catch a plane, to go skiing in the Alps for two weeks. Not that I wanted to go with you; I wasn't able to leave town, I'm not a very good skier, I couldn't expect you to pay my way, but after going out with you for three years, I don't like surprises. (A musical apology)

...special mention goes to

"The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation." By Rednex 

Film Title

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D

...but it once was

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

Band Name

The Clouds That Fondle Jagged Crags And Raging Storms Conspire And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

Album Title - Chumbawumba

The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother's hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don't just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to 'guard' any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it's over, then it's done, and the boy bands have won.

An impromptu podcast featuring long-time friend Jeff Barnes waxing under influences on the mismatched pastiche of music and setting in a late night scene from a Lebanese restaurant here in Hamilton, Ontario.
 
A bottle of red, a bottle of white, a horrible musical compilation that should be titled "Slices of Blandness".
 
This podcast marks the marriage of the scripted lovehate podcasts with the impromptu podcasts. Episodes 42 of both are now combined in the new episode 85.

Since I've been getting some nice responses from the two installments of Sesame Surrealism, and since it's too late to post a long and rambling lovehate about the minutae that is my pop cultured life, I give you Sesame Songs.
 
To refresh you on the basic concept, so many of the animated clips on Sesame Street, completely normal within the context of the show when we were kids, are odd to downright bizarre when watched on their own years later. The songs, however, were sometimes completely groovy and endlessly catchy.
 
Sunny days sweepin' the clouds away... I hope you are inspired to Do The Pigeon... that sounded dirty and probably illegal.