(12:32 AM) | Anonymous:

So Much For The City...

• Facial Hair. I need some outside opinions - am I right in suspecting that nearly every single female absolutely hates facial hair of almost any sort, and certainly of the ghotee/beard sort? I know the many many females in my family do, and I know I've overheard women at least 10-20 times say something like "but..he has a ghotee" or.."If you two start dating, the first thing you need to go is to get him to shave.." Is this correct? I ask because, in my experience, almost every male thinks he looks cooler with facial hair. What's more, he thinks other males look cooler with facial hair. I also ask because I tried an experiment with a beard again, and was just screwing around, trying some things different to have some fun, and expressly stated to everyone I knew that it was just for fun and I certainly didn't think it was anything serious, yet every male told me it looked great, and every female told me it looked terrible.
  
  Corrolary Question: Is this dichotomy directly related to women thinking of the face in terms of kissibility? I had a friend in high school who said he always knew he was "getting places" with a girl when she asked him to shave his ghotee, then he'd wink and knowingly nod and say stuff like "you know what I mean? ha ha..I mean..you know what I mean, right? ha ha" He actually said ha ha too..he didn't like..laugh. Anyway, I hope this is the case, as then, by my friend's standards, I can instantly assume that every girl who mentioned that my ratty looking beard needed to come off ultimately was hoping to get with me, in the JC Chasez sense of that phrase.
  
  
• CD Change Day Posts - My CD player in my car is broke, so, my CD Change Day posts are also broke. There is some faulty wiring somewhere, I just get static on the channel that is supposed to be my CD player..this is perhaps an improvement over previously when randomly it would break into static for a bit after working fine, causing me to curse and crash each time, and then it'd come back, and then it'd go out. And then I'd have to jiggle the wires in the back until eventually it'd be fine again. Then this would happen again. I know I'm a lot closer to Jesus just listening to the radio the last week.
  
  
• Concerts I Have Been To But Not Posted About With SXSW going on last week, we got a lot of leftovers. So I went to a lot of concerts. I skipped out on The Walkmen on sunday and The Monolith last night, but still I saw The Starlight Mints again last saturday, The Unicorns on Monday, then I saw John Vanderslice on Tuesday, Preston School of Industry on Wednesday, and Low Flying Owls tonight. This was my idea of spring break.
  Here's a quick synopsis:
  Starlight Mints: Gods. Best band out there today? I think so. FLAME ON! Also..they played the rare but beautiful "popsicle" for the home crowd, I reccomend you all buy the single, it was their first.
  The Unicorns - Freak yeah. Crazy. Good. Who will cut our hair when we're gone?
  John Vanderslice/Okkervil River ### Okkervil River opened but only played 4 songs, but after the show they said they liked my "My new fighting technique is unstoppable" t-shirt. Vanderslice is amazing, greatly cool, great songwriting. I totally love the dude.
  Preston School of Industry +++ Come on, it's a Pavement off shoot, you know how much I urine I had to clean up when I saw they were coming to OKC? Of course it was amazing, and I didn't post a review because it'd just be me saying "oh my-lanta" in DJ Tanner like tones for pages and pages on end.
  Low Flying Owls ÷÷÷ Alright, not up to the snuff of the other shows of this week, but God bless 'em for trying, because trying is something to be blessed.
  
  
• Sufjan Stevens His new album, Seven Swans, came out on tuesday. I went to my Music Warehouse which is staffed by indie rock allstars to get the cd, and they didn't know who he was. I am reaching new indie heights. The manager, who is as close to a personal friend as I come, because he considers me a regular, was all like "Dude..is that something like Air or something?" and I got to be like "No..it's sort of like Bright Eyes or Elliott Smith..except bright and cheery instead of dark..or something, I don't know" How much more indie conversation can you get? I'll be writing for Dusted and Pitchfork in no time. But, anyway, I ordered it from Amazon. Apparently this album is much much more "Christian" but..in a way that gives proper respect to the fullness of the religious topic without letting it overwhelm the music. I think really, the Pitchfork review of this CD summed up everything I've ever though about the struggles of Christian Music, including a slight reference to my analysis that "sex" is missing when he discusses the one misstep by Sufjan on the album as "impotent." The dude is totally ripping off my material! But seriously, this paragraph said what I've been trying to say in sum of most Christian music for years:
  
  "Religious content, by its very faith-based nature, is passionate and fantastical, and, if not fashioned with a commensurate degree of care and artifice, the emotion exceeds the form, throwing the listener headlong into the realm of melodrama and self-parody (confer all "Christian rock" bands)."
  
  View the rest here. Hopefully I'll have better luck at the Music WHOREhouse come tuesday, when I go to fetch the new Iron & Wine CD. If not, I'll have to hit the small record shops, because waiting 2 weeks for Amazon's SUPER SAVER shipping is just not worth it, but neither is 3-4 bucks in shipping charges.
  
  Almost forgot, I did pick up Norah Jones' newest, as well as Damien Jurado's newest in lieu of Sufjan, so as not to waste a trip. Both are spectacular. I had originally typed "spectaculicious" there, but felt it was overdoing it. I ask you, the reader, would it have been?
  
  
• The Passion. I finally saw this thing that everyone speaks of. I am way late, so I won't give it the full review I want to..but to answer Curious's question from a long long time ago, yeah..I agree with Adam, the Romans killed Jesus. I think with any picture of God, you must start with love. To picture Jesus as someone sent purely to die so God's blood-lust could be met and then he could allow people in is not picturing God as love, I don't think. In that sense, I'd say God didn't kill Christ, and thus the crucifixion wasn't pre-ordained to happen or anything. Yet, at the same time, there was no chance it wouldn't happen because any time perfect love meets up with the perfect evil of this world, someone is going to die. But, God didn't kill Jesus. Our sins didn't kill Jesus. The path Jesus took in stark contrast to that of conventional wisdom, inviting people to see the world through a different perspective, killed Jesus. We killed Jesus only in the sense that if He were to come back again today, we'd kill him again. Who knows, maybe we have.
  
  Thus, I'm somewhat disappointed with The Passion focusing so much on the bloodiness of the cross, and focusing so little on the message of the Christ. Yes, he suffered insurmountable torture, probably not to the point where the guards were tossing the cross back and forth, flipping it over and all that. But the point is not the crucifixion itself..if so, our love belongs just as much to the 1,000 jewish insurrectionists who were crucified, or to Peter, or to the gladiator revolt, or to the hundreds of thousands of others who were also crucified. The point of the crucifixion, what makes it so crucial to the Christian faith, is that it is the ultimate statement of giving up a grasp on history..it is the full follow through of the message of Christ - to live a life based in love instead of fear, to refuse fear of death, or fear of being forgotten, or fear of not being successful while alive. I pity that that aspect..which is the only thing that makes Christianity something "worth it" was relegated to haphazard and short flash backs, while we were treated to 90 minutes of non-stop gore and blood in something of a cosmic guilt trip.
  
  
• Summary. I think that's all. Tomorrow The Velvet Teen are in town, but I'm somewhat sick of concerts, so I'll probably skip. The Strokes are here on Wednesday with The Sounds, but I have class on wednesdays, and have a group presentation to work on in class that day. Dangit. Although I wasn't totally crushing on the 30 dollar tickets. I also read Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" last week, and am almost done with Marcus Borg's "Jesus: A New Vision"..American Gods was great if not deserving of a full fleshed review, but I liked the concept of all the gods brought over with the immigrants and dying and vying for power and what not. Reminded me a lot of Douglas Adams' "Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul" except infinitely less funny and thought provoking..but still..Gaiman shows promise, even if Pratchett was clearly the driving force behind the genius of Good Omens. The "New Vision" book is decent too, though it's basically turned out to just be a re-telling of the history of The Quest For The Historical Jesus. I'd like it a lot better if he didn't start the book by having a very good chapter on why whether or not this exact stuff actually happened doesn't matter...then spending the entire book going through what scholars can say with some umption did happen, and what they must say "might have" or is "probably part of the kerygma"..sigh.
  
  Oh, also, I saw Second Hand Lions with my sister, because she cooked dinner, and thus got to choose the movie...that's actually a really great film, as far as feel good somewhat kid's movies go. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also saw the Parker Posey movie The House of Yes last night, and that was some screwed up stuff, but very darkly funny, and even Tori Spelling and Freddie Prinze Jr. couldn't screw it up. Oh yeah, Parker is hot as well.
  
  I think that pretty much clears out everything I meant to post a long post about but never did..now maybe I can get some fresh ideas..?
  

| permalink | Main Page