Carvey as Darwin, and kicking ass

My name is DarWIN, not DarLOSE

Dana Carvey is "DARWIN" - watch more funny videos

A Glorious Dawn

"If you wish to make
an apple pie from scratch,
you must
first
create the universe"

- Dr. Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Zoltan Mesko

After the NFL draft, I was going through the Patriots picks, and was surprised to see that they had taken Zoltan Mesko, a punter from Michigan, in the 5th round, an entire round earlier than the next punter drafted.

Turns out that Zoltan was a team captain, and lead the Big-10 in yards per punt. With a 6'5, 230 lb frame, he was also a running threat, and a 4-year letterman.

These facts were nothing after I Youtube'd the guy. Training camp isn't months from starting, but I might have a new favorite Patriot.

Aliens may pose threat, says Hawking

Sorry for the recent hiatus from the blogosphere, but I was in the process of switching coasts.

Maybe I should have been changing more than that, if what Stephen Hawking recently said is correct. Looking to start a colony on a different planet?

In a new series about the Universe on the Discovery Channel, Hawking said humans should fear a potential alien encounter, and he believes that their existence is virtually guaranteed.

[Hawking] suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is "a little too risky". He said: "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

Humans Should Fear Aliens: Huffington Post

Stewart's Killer Commentary

From his position as a self-described comedian, The Daily Shows John Stewart seamlessly slices and dices the bullshit that we have come to expect from our mainstream media, primarily FOX News. In doing so, he (even as a comedian) changes our perceptions of what the political banter in DC is really all about. And what better way to break the barrier between ignorance and accuracy than through humor?

Here's a few of his best from the last two weeks:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Big Bang Treaty
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
A Farewell to Arms
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
That's Tariffic
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Tenacious O
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

BANKSY

Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. We the people, affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.

- Banksy

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss.

- Banksy

His identity? Unknown.

Location? Unknown.

His art? Well, that's a slightly different story.

Banksy, the renowned British Graffiti Artist, is believed to have been born sometime in the mid-1970s near Bristol. I first came in contact in his work while in Edinburgh during April of '09. I was walking down an alley and found a mural on the side of a wall, depicting a man and women embracing but unable to touch because of large metal helmets, the kind you'd imagine in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I was blown away. His first film, a documentary entitled Exit Through the Gift Shop, opened this year at the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews.

Some of his work is more playful, and some pretty moving. The first piece above is actually in Bethlehem on a wall separating Israeli and Palestinian settlements. In 2005 he stenciled into the wall at the Penguin exhibit at the London Zoo We're bored of fish, and managed to place art of his own in the British Museum, London Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, and the American Museum of Natural History without detection.

BANKSY Wikipedia

There's NO WAY you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover.

- Metropolitan Police Spokesperson
(on the cover of his new book)

Summer Groove, Take 2

Yesterday I prematurely called Hurricane J the anthem of the summer. It's a great track, and will certainly make the top 10 (again, why am I even guessing)... but THIS song, by Paul Pena, is definitely in the running too.



Pena (1950-2005) was born on Cape Cod, to parents of Cape Verdean decent. He was blind by the time he was 20, but boy could he sing and play the guitar. He opened for the Grateful Dead, performed at the Newport Jazz Fest, and was featured in the Documentary Genghis Blues.

Check 'em out

And now, Obama: The Diplomat

Obama Puts His Own Mark on Foreign Policy Issues - NY Times

If there is an Obama doctrine emerging, it is one much more realpolitik than his predecessor’s, focused on relations with traditional great powers and relegating issues like human rights and democracy to second-tier concerns. He has generated much more good will around the world after years of tension with Mr. Bush, and yet he does not seem to have strong personal friendships with many world leaders.

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower. And when conflicts break out, one way or another, we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.
- Barack Obama

Addendum 4/15: Obama Speech Signals a U.S. Shift on the Middle East

This shift is driving the White House's urgency to help broker a Middle East peace deal. It increases the likelihood that Mr. Obama, frustrated by the inability of the Israelis and Palestinians to come to terms, will offer his own parameters for an eventual Palestinian state.

Mr. Obama's words reverberated through diplomatic circles in large part because they echoed those of General David H. Petraeus, the military commander overseeing America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the surge in Afghanistan, withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq due to begin this year, Special Forces operations (and drone strikes) in Pakistan - as well as new diplomatic pressure, movement towards international economic sanctions against Iran, and now this new potential strategy at brokering an Israeli-Palestinian deal, Mr. Obama is quickly reshaping American Foreign Policy in the Middle East. Call me a cynic (or a realist), but in each case it seems as though he is delicately scaling a mountain of kindling, and one match (or misstep) could ignite an inferno of flames.

What did he do?

London based indie-rock group One eskimO performing Kandi off of their most recent album.

I wanted to create a sound of my own:
magical, ambient, filmic, acoustic, beautiful and meaningful.
I wanted to write about how I felt about
life, love,
losses and failures,
highs and lows, even heartbreaks.

But also about how amazing human life is,

and how mind-blowing our very existence is.

- Kristian Leontiou, Vocals/Composer

Henri Cartier-Bresson

A Photographer Whose Beat Was the World

Rarely has the phrase “man of the world” been more aptly applied than to the protean photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the subject of a handsome and large — though surely not anywhere near large enough — retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday.

For much of his long career as a photojournalist, which began in the 1930s and officially ended three decades before his death in 2004, Cartier-Bresson was compulsively on the move. By plane, train, bus, car, bicycle, rickshaw, horse and on foot, he covered the better part of five continents in a tangled, crisscrossing itinerary of arcs and dashes.

In addition to being exhaustively mobile, he was widely connected. Good-looking, urbane, the rebellious child of French haute bourgeois privilege, he networked effortlessly, and had ready access to, and friendships with, the political and culture beau monde of his time.

Slide Show: Cartier-Bresson’s Modern Century (Lens Blog)

Ahmet Ertug

Turkish Photographer, Architect, Historian, and Publisher, Ahmet Ertug, began taking photos in the early 1970s, while studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. His photographs frequently focus on art and architecture, or subjects of anthropological and historical significance. In short, they're beautiful.

"[His] photography has a deep meditative energy and it withdraws the observer into the intellectual content of his subjects, ranging from the vast interior of monumental buildings to the silent gazes of ancient sculptures."

Check out his galleries:

http://www.ahmetertug.com/index.html

"The HBO Auteur"

David Simon, above, with cast and crew members. Photo: NY Times Magazine

I had heard friends rave about The Wire for years, but didn't start watching it until this past September, when a neighbor graciously loaned me Season 1. I finished the final season, 5, a few weeks ago.

Go rent it. Seriously. Or buy it. I don't care. Just watch it. You really won't regret it.

A recent NY Times Magazine article proclaimed The Wire creator David Simon as "The HBO Auteur."

The Wire fires on all cylinders. It exposes us to a slew of complex, affable, developed, and intriguing characters as it "[builds] a vivid portrait of urban America as seen through the prism of its institutions and professions — the police department, the drug trade, the dockworkers, the local government, the schools, the press."

The article continues:

"By the time “The Wire” reached the end of its run, commentators went from posing the coy question, “Is ‘The Wire’ the best show on television?” to making the bold statement, “ ‘The Wire’ is the best show on television”— boldness that soon seemed spineless once seemingly everyone defaulted to calling it simply, “The best show in television history.” In the two years since “The Wire” concluded, a pitched battle of ongoing praise has upped the comparative ante. If likening Simon repeatedly to Dickens and Dreiser, Balzac and Tolstoy and Shakespeare hasn’t proved adequately exalting, Bill Moyers lately freshened things up by calling Simon “our Edward Gibbon,” while the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels went so far as to suggest that the beauty and difficulty of watching “The Wire” in English — the multifarious 21st-century English of Baltimore detectives and drug dealers — compares with that of reading Dante in 14th-century Italian. It should go without saying that Duke; the University of California, Berkeley; and, next term, Harvard, are offering courses on the series, seminars focused not merely on the sophistication of its storytelling but also on its sociological and political perspicacity."



On April 11, Simon's new show Treme, makes it debut on HBO.

"The Story Lines in Treme begin three months after Katrina, and they follow a diverse group of characters as they rebuild their lives in a city torn apart, a city in which tens of thousands of houses are abandoned, in which only 50 percent of the population remains, in which neighborhoods are still without power. The main characters in “Treme” aren’t the overburdened cops, spiraling addicts, ruthless dealers, struggling dockworkers, corrupt politicians or compromised journalists of “The Wire.” In their place, for the most part, are musicians, as the show’s title sneakily suggests: “Treme” (pronounced trih-MAY) is the New Orleans neighborhood where jazz was born. And even though it adjoins the French Quarter, few tourists visit Treme, where generations of the city’s musicians have lived.

As much as crime of every kind was central to “The Wire,” music is the focus of “Treme.” New Orleans-born and Juilliard-trained Wendell Pierce (William “Bunk” Moreland in “The Wire”) plays a trombone player looking for any gig he can get; Steve Zahn plays a feckless singer-songwriter with an allergy to paying work. As in “The Wire,” many nonactors, in this case professional musicians, have been cast in “Treme” in leading roles: the violinist Lucia Micarelli plays a street musician; a charismatic local trumpeter, Kermit Ruffins, plays himself; and dozens of other musicians — from Dr. John to Elvis Costello — appear in smaller parts. The cast is different from “The Wire,” however, because a number of more famous actors are part of “Treme.” John Goodman plays an English professor-novelist enraged by federal and municipal post-Katrina intransigence; the Academy Award-nominee Melissa Leo is a civil rights attorney with a soft spot for starving artists; and Clarke Peters, the distinguished stage and screen actor memorable in “The Wire” as the miniature-furniture-making detective Lester Freamon, plays an independent contractor and a Mardi Gras Indian chief."

Not sure I can wait for this one to come out on DVD.

"Do You Wanna" Clip Trailer: Day

Warhol on Life

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.

People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything.

Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.

- Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987)

Food For Thought

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.

If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.

But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.

This makes it hard to plan the day.

- E.B. White (1899 - 1985)

If you read my blog you know I'm a pilates freak. And by pilates I mean waffles...

On Saturday March 6, comedian Zach Galifianakis hosted Saturday Night Live, and gave one of the best opening monologues in recent memory. From the viral success of his online series "Between Two Ferns", to his outlandish performance as Allen in "The Hangover", to instant classics like his music video for Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothing", we've come to expect the best from this man.