86 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(06/09/08 4:34pm)
The last time you saw someone twisting a balloon into a dog or sword, you probably thought it was an impressive party trick. Maybe you were about 8 years old. But the documentary “TWISTED: A Balloonamentary” shows balloon artists invest a whole lot more than childish amusement into those fancy pieces of latex.\nThe feature-length documentary, which came Friday to Key Cinemas in Indianapolis, has the tagline “Once You Can Make a Balloon Dog, You Can Do Anything.” The film chronicles the lives of eight individuals whose lives were transformed by careers in balloon-twisting, ranging from the man who started twisting to show kids in his community that they could find careers apart from the drug trade to the woman who twists “adult” sculptures and appeared as a “balloon dominatrix” at Hugh Hefner’s birthday party.\n“TWISTED” shows the balloon-twisting community rife with quirky, passionate people. They gather at large balloon-twisting conventions, where they compete in building large, complex sculptures. Some of the sculptures shown included a Trojan horse, a haunted house and a man deep-sea diving with a shark.\n“It’s not just the three-twist dog your grandmother used to see,” balloon twister John Holmes said in the movie. “It’s gone to a whole new level.”\nConventions also include 24-hour “jamming” rooms, where twisters gather with other balloon artists and share how they achieve their handiwork. \nTwo such convention-goers attended the Friday opening, having stuck around for demonstrations after decorating the lobby with balloon sculptures of hot-air balloons and a large monkey. One of the balloon artists, Frank Bunton, who was wearing a pin that read “SUGGESTED TIP $219,497” and was once almost kicked out of Disney World for illegal balloon-twisting, confirmed the passion of convention-goers like those in the movie.\n“There’ll be more people in the ‘jam’ room at 4 in the morning than were sitting at the bar at 11:30, 12 o’clock at night,” Bunton said. “They’re up all night long.”\nThe documentary’s co-director and co-producer Sarah Taksler, who learned to twist as a child, said the inspiration for the movie came when a fellow balloon twister she met in college told her about a balloon-twisting convention in Boston. The two decided to scope it out.\n“The stories were really colorful, the fact that there were balloon conventions – I was blown away,” Taksler said.\n“TWISTED” is the first feature-length documentary for both Taksler and her college friend, the movie’s other co-director and co-producer Naomi Greenfield. \n“The first convention ... was more of a scalping mission,” Taksler said. “Neither of us had gone to film school.”\nBut as they discovered more and more about the colorful balloon-twister crowd, they realized they wanted to spread the word.\nMuch like the balloon-twisters in the movie said they love making balloons because giving them away makes someone else’s day, Taksler said she loves seeing other people’s reactions to her film.\n“I don’t know that I have favorite parts of the movie,” Taksler said, “but I have favorite parts to watch for the audience to respond to.”\nThe audience Friday responded actively the entire movie, from the animated segment narrated by Jon Stewart about balloon-twisting’s history – starting when the Aztecs twisted shapes out of cat bowels – to the ending when two conventioneers tied the knot, so to speak, with the bride in a balloon wedding dress.\n“TWISTED” will be showing at Key Cinemas in Indianapolis, 4044 S. Keystone Ave., for at least two weeks, according to the theater’s Web site. Information about show times can be found at www.keycinemas.com.
(06/05/08 6:31pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>On Tuesday afternoon, the skies were still dark from the thunderstorms that had torn through Bloomington earlier in the day, but a breeze settled in to cool off the season’s first Tuesday Market in the Bloomingfoods Near West parking lot.
Passionate local agriculturists set up tables of their favorite produce under tents and umbrellas while shoppers took the opportunity to stop by after work and get fresher herbs, vegetables and other locally harvested items than they could grab at the supermarket. The acoustic guitar set of Bloomington musician Curtis Cantwell Jackson also drifted through the air, encouraging a relaxed atmosphere.
The Tuesday Market takes place from 4 to 7 p.m. June through September in the Bloomingfoods Near West parking lot, 316 W. Sixth St., with live music from 5 to 6:30 p.m. It’s a smaller weekday counterpart to the much larger Bloomington Community Farmers’ Market that happens Saturday mornings from April to November at Showers Common, 401 N. Morton St.,
“It’s a lot more mellow,” Market Master Bradley Drake said.
But the vendors who came out Tuesday didn’t let the smaller atmosphere detract from their passion about what they were selling.
Bloomington resident Paty Skinner was selling “16th to 19th Century Heirlooms,” as the whiteboard in front of her table read, which included plants such as sorrel, purselane (a type of herb) and Swiss chard, all of which had not been genetically modified or cross-pollenated for the last 200 years, Skinner said.
She let customers sample her produce and talked about how glad she was the rain had held off so she could come out, describing herself as “a happy camper.”
John Bavender, a Bloomington resident since 1964 and regular vendor at the Saturday market, said because of the weather he only had time to pack the Styrofoam cooler of fresh eggs at his feet and the lawn-set umbrella over his head.
Bavender has about 40 chickens – plus 13 recently hatched chicks – and breeds “showbird” chickens. He said he was instrumental in getting an ordinance passed in Bloomington that allows residents to keep up to five hens on their property with the permission of their neighbors.
“I just like chickens, period,” he said. “You can’t be prejudiced against chickens in Bloomington – you can’t be prejudiced against anything in Bloomington.”
Customers enjoyed the Tuesday Market’s convenience as well as its atmosphere.
Gloria Bruner, also a Bloomington resident, said she dropped by to get some vegetables for dinner to feed her family of six. She was glad the weekday option for the market was available, as she usually is giving violin lessons during the Saturday market, and she enjoys the atmosphere.
“It’s sort of like the difference between going to the mall and a little corner store,” she said.
Drake said City of Bloomington Parks & Recreation, which is in charge of the event, is trying to make the Tuesday Market more of a “block party” type event. Although this is the 10th year for the event, it is the first it has been held in the Bloomingfoods Near West parking lot, instead of the plaza by City Hall.
“We’re really trying to create this festival atmosphere,” he said.
VIDEO:
Highlights from Tuesday Market and Bloomington Community Farmers'' Market
(05/15/08 1:36am)
After Radiohead’s release of their album In Rainbows last fall for any-price-you-want-to-pay, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor decided to take the formula one step further: Why not just give the album away for free?
(05/07/08 9:39pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Their first studio album in 11 years, Portishead’s Third is everything a comeback album should be.With three albums over their 17-year existence, Portishead have never been prolific, but they’ve never taken the chance to skew their outstanding track record, either. Third sees Portishead again living up to their standard that if you’re going to take forever to put out material, it better be damn good.Every beat, texture and vocal of Third is immaculate. The group neither recycles nor throws back to the trip-hop they made famous in the ’90s, nor do they dismiss their old style entirely and take a left-field approach with a style that doesn’t work for them. Instead, they update trip-hop – a genre that has seemed dead for quite a while – and churn out a thoroughly 2008 piece of haunting electronica.Third is the kind of album you’re always looking for in new music but rarely find – an album that tells you what it’s like to be living in the time and place you are. It captures the eeriness of postmodern alienation that most people feel but can’t articulate, with the way it separates vocalist Beth Gibbons’airy singing from the grounded yet bizarre electronic instrumentation beneath her.It’s hard to describe Third’s instrumentation, as it’s nearly all electronic sounds that don’t seem reminiscent of anything in particular. Its progressions often go from cold to discordant, and its beats are irregular and unpredictable. But it’s still engaging, inviting multiple listens to define its textures and the way they work.The only song on the album that comes close to being a miss is the uke-friendly “Deep Water.” It’s pretty enough, but its minimalist folk comes off as distracting to the rest of Third’s brooding electronica.Such a minor misstep, though, can’t begin to bring down this album. Third is not only one of the most sonically brilliant releases of 2008, it might change the way you see the world around you.
(05/07/08 9:08pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In the three years since Madonna’s last studio album Confessions on a Dance Floor, the world has been waiting eagerly for the “Vogue” woman’s next celluloid reminder that she has become irrelevant.Now that reminder has come in the form of her latest effort, Hard Candy. From its outdated bubblegum BDSM-sleaze cover (that will look sexier in its Al Yankovic parody) to its cycle of over-processed dance beats, Madonna misses no mark in reminding us that she may not have entered the real world since 1989.She makes sure to establish this from the get-go with her opener “Candy Shop.” Only the Usher-Young Jeezy combo could beat this misunderstanding of the term “clubbanger.” It’s clearly trying to be a dance-floor hit, but it’s hard to imagine a remix even being able to spice up its dated bleep-blipping and snoozer chorus. “Don’t pretend you’re not hungry / I’ve got plenty to eat / Come in to my store / 'Cause my sugar is sweet,” Madonna croons, in imagery whose eroticism could have been beat had it been written by a sexually latent candy-shopping 8-year-old.The same themes appear throughout almost the entire album - bland dance beats, overproduced electronic instrumentation and insincere, melodramatic lyrics. She does try to branch out, however. “Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You,” for instance, consists of her singing a cappella through alternating channels between periods of complete silence. Not only is it, like, avant-garde, it’s even sort of Zappa, man.But Hard Candy does have a couple of saving graces. “Incredible” is weird enough to be appealing. The buzzing synthesizers and the unpredictable channel-switching of its vocals and instrumentation make it a trippy listen.The album’s best track is its single “4 Minutes,” but the blame for that seems to lie more in collaborators Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, who add a passion and propulsion that’s missing in the song when Madonna takes the vocal helm.The days when Madonna could save the world in four minutes are gone. But at least she’s inspired musicians of the ’00s to take her place.
(05/05/08 6:17am)
Candidates’ personalities were more important than issues for some students who voted in local and state elections Saturday at the Curry Building, but they generally knew little about either.\n“If it’s a name I’ve heard of before, I might know a little bit about them,” incoming freshman Elizabeth Wegener said.\nTuesday, Indiana’s Democratic election primaries will matter on a national scale for the first time in 16 years. The widespread media attention the Indiana primaries have received because of the undecided Democratic presidential race this year has pushed twice as many Hoosiers out to the polls as in 2004, according to the Indiana Secretary of State’s office. This has caused more students to vote in local and state primaries as well.\nMany students, eager to get in on the action, voted early on Saturday at the Curry Building, 290 W. Seventh St.. \nWegener, who took advantage of Saturday’s early voting because she will be working the polls Tuesday, said she was motivated to come out because she wanted to vote in the Republican presidential primary.\nBecause the main issue she wanted to vote on was Iraq, she said, she was not sure what issues were important on a local or state level. Instead, she was choosing to vote for local and state candidates based on what she knew about them as people.\nLaw student Ben Ellis said he, too, was voting for local and state candidates based on the character and integrity of specific candidates rather than where they stood on particular issues.\n“Since the candidates are so close on issues, I don’t feel like you can separate one out,” Ellis said.\nAs a law student and worker at Barack Obama’s campaign office, he said he knows many of the candidates personally and was voting based on how he felt about his interactions with them and whether they came off \nas reliable.\n“I know these people, and I trust them ... They have an integrity I can vouch for,” \nhe said.\nEllis said that although he was there to vote in the presidential primary, it was not his main motivation for also finding out more about local and state primaries.\n“I actually would have voted already on local and state issues,” he said.\nJunior Maura Schonwald, who voted Saturday because she will be out of town Tuesday, said she came out to vote in the Democratic primary and only did a little research on the candidates for local and state elections. \nHowever, unlike Ellis and Wegener, Schonwald said she votes for issues over personalities. Issues that are of particular importance to her, she said, include “the environment, criminal punishment and education.”\nSchonwald also acknowledged that the importance of a position plays into how she votes. She said city council seats are important, as well as the seats of governor \nand mayor.\nEllis also said he cast votes for certain seats but not others, but that was mostly because he didn’t know anyone who was running for those seats rather than because he assumed they were less important.\n“With state and local,” Ellis said, “it’s more about character.”
(04/23/08 1:53am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Supergrass’ appeal has always lain in their being the opposite of heady intellectual rockers. Since their ’90s Britpop days, they’ve established themselves as masters of music for hangin’ out and havin’ fun.But their latest effort Diamond Hoo Ha sees them suffering that hard-to-avoid fate of bands who make their name playing music about being young and loving life: They've grown up and learned to play their instruments.On Diamond Hoo Ha, the party beats and naive cleverness of Supergrass’ earlier albums have been replaced with guitar wankery and “youthful” lyrics that might have “shocked” someone in 1945. While they used to sound like ’60s rock ’n’ roll met glam in the ’90s, now they sound like they copped The Vines (who did a much better job copping them) and forgot it’s not the ’90s anymore.The best song on the album is its opener “Diamond Hoo Ha Man.” It has one of Hoo Ha’s few memorable hooks, and, despite their lack of substance, gets its lyrics stuck in your head: “I’m gonna hot tail / To the motel” and “I got to get you in my suit case / It’s duty-free.” But it’s only downhill from there.The album is full of guitar solos, dragging “ooh”/ “aah” breaks, unmemorable lyrics about nothing in particular and songs that teeter on the edge of setting a mood but never quite do it. And despite its competent production, it comes off as sloppy.Diamond Hoo Ha is certainly a listenable album, if nothing else. There’s little on it that’s outright irritating, but there’s also little worth coming back to. The group tries to recreate the energy it had when its members were in their late teens and 20s, but they come off instead as being out of touch and trying too hard.Like the dated fade-out ending at the end of the album’s closer “Butterfly,” Supergrass must not have known when to stop.
(04/16/08 4:21pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>San Francisco-based indie duo The Dodos will bring their music to Dunn Meadow on April 19 for WIUX’s Culture Shock. So what you’re probably wondering is: What do they sound like?The band’s most recent album Visiter, which was released in March, is a collection of folk-pop that puts melody over mind, preferring to create an atmosphere over showing off lyrical prowess. They emphasize percussion, guitar and vocals with Joy Division-esque equality, but with a brighter, acoustic sound.The group’s standout strength is its percussion. In a world of indie pop that hits dry drums on eighth and quarter notes, The Dodos fill their sonic space with complicated rhythms crashing and banging. Their drums sound miked from a distance, creating a lot of ambience that’s clean and tranquil as much as it is noisy and enveloping.But even though the drumming stands out because it’s unusual, The Dodos’ guitar is just as impressive. It’s all acoustic, but whether it’s the slide guitar in “Paint the Rust,” the frenetic finger work of “Jody” or the jangling pop it usually sticks to, it all comes off as virtuosic but never pretentious.Vocals contribute more to Visiter’s ambience than to lyrical substance, often repeating the same line for most of the song. But the approach doesn’t subtract from the album’s appeal, instead making it all the easier to lose yourself in.Visiter’s main drawback is that after a while of listening, the songs get monotonous. The jangle and repetition are endearing for a few tracks, but listening to the whole album straight through is taxing, especially during “Joe’s Waltz,” the fifth song, which clocks in at more than seven minutes and doesn’t pick up speed until more than half way in.But Visiter is a comforting album, the kind to listen to while drinking some hot tea. And if Culture Shock is as cold as it was last year, you might want to consider doing that when you go see them this week.
(04/16/08 3:38pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Charlton Heston’s death April 5 has fueled much nostalgia about his classics: “The Ten Commandments,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Ben Hur.” And yet, no one has been pointing to the most famous line in Heston’s film career: “Soylent Green is people!” Why no one has cared to bring up 1973’s “Soylent Green” is not a mystery: It’s terrible. Even though critics make a career out of sadism, when a film star dies, it’s poor taste to bash on their worst roles. But this logic is unfair to “Soylent Green.” Liking bad movies for being bad takes way more creativity than liking good movies or even movies that are so bad they’re good. And “Soylent Green” doesn’t fit the so-bad-it’s-good category: It’s straight-up bad. I’ve watched this atrocity four times, which I believe exceeds a legal sanity limit by three times. But I hope that, in sharing with you just how bad it is, you will take the opportunity to track it down and find creative ways to mock it for yourself. “Soylent Green” is set in the year 2022, and the world has become so overcrowded that more than 40 million people are living in New York City. If you work out the math on this, it means everyone had some outrageous number of children between 1973 and 2022, but such major math errors are irrelevant when fear mongering. Global warming has excelled so much that even with headache-inducing low camera lighting you can tell Heston is sweating the whole time, and the only food most people can afford is synthetic compounds called “Soylent.” There’s Soylent Yellow and Soylent Red, made from vegetable concentrates, and there’s the most popular, Soylent Green, which is made from plankton. That is, it’s made from plankton until one of the executives of the Soylent Company is caned to death, in a scene so poorly acted that the “fourth wall” of the TV screen won’t stop you from squirming like the clumsiest kid in your high school just walked in your living room. Heston, a.k.a., Det. Robert Thorn, is put on the case. However, he fails to make much headway because rampant consumerism has turned everyone into a selfish asshole. At least, that’s the explanation the movie wants you to believe. I’d say he probably could have solved it a lot sooner had he not spent so much time talking to his partner Sol (Edward G. Robinson, “Double Indemnity”), the film’s flat symbol of nostalgia who begins a lot of sentences with “I remember when … ” followed by remarks about how “good” real food was back in the day – descriptions so unappealing they made me lose my appetite.The one-liners and dialogue in this movie are as melodramatic as its plot. Of course, these all culminate in Heston moaning (in the only scene that could have used more grandeur) from his death stretcher that “Soylent Green is made out of people! ... You’ve got to tell them, Soylent Green is people!”Heston’s characterization of Thorn as a hardass is arguably the only redeeming aspect of the film in itself, but at the same time it makes his attempt at the melodramatic dialogue even more hilarious. He slags women off as “furniture,” including the one with whom he shares one of cinema’s most awkward shower scenes, set to lounge music. Afterward, he makes love to her with the air conditioner blasting. At one point, he takes a cigarette from a woman at a party and declares, “You know, if I had the money, I’d smoke two, three of these every day!” The best scene in “Soylent Green” occurs when Sol takes off for a suicide-assistance center and Thorn chases him down, only to discover him watching a nostalgic nature video. After watching the video, which looks like a “Sound of Music” parody (and was parodied itself in a “South Park” episode), Sol dies a symbolic death, wherein he takes the human soul, biblical wisdom and other heavy-handed symbolism involving sunlight with him. Sure, “Soylent Green” isn’t the best movie in Heston’s catalogue. But it reminds us what great actors can do with bad roles: make fools of themselves.
(03/20/08 2:34pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>More than four years in the making, The Gutter Twins’ debut album Saturnalia is worth the wait. The group is a collaboration between two cult-favorite 90’s-alt-rock band front men – The Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees. But it never comes off as “’90s-alt-rock made in the ’00s” in the same way as, say, late Garbage, nor does it suffer from typical supergroup half-assedness. No, Saturnalia is well-constructed, timely and made by two musicians with fantastic vocal and ideological chemistry. It’s a dark and introspective album, preferring an overall mood to a series of snappy songs. That’s not to say it’s melodramatic or indulgent – it’s full of hooks and memorable melodies, but the way they build to create the whole album is more important than what they do for their respective songs.Perhaps what’s most alluring about Saturnalia is that it feels like it’s teetering on edges. It’s soft for the most part, allowing its dynamics to change only for loud, dramatic bursts, and it’s written in minor keys, allowing it to get brighter but never quite go major. The lyrical territory ranges from weird sexuality and violence (“Little girls might twitch at the way I hitch / But when I burn it’s a son of a bitch” in “All Misery/Flowers”) to religious reference (“I hear the rapture’s coming / They say he’ll be here soon” in “The Stations”) .Of course, one of those edges goes from poignancy into pretentiousness, and occasionally The Gutter Twins fall off. “Idle Hands,” for instance, includes such lyrics as, “It’s all right to drag the lake / And find the things you love / They won’t wait in line to see me float / Asleep above the waves.”
(02/20/08 8:39pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>For its fourth studio album Seventh Tree, electronic duo Goldfrapp has abandoned the dance focus that characterized its last two albums, 2003’s Black Cherry and 2005’s Supernature, and turned to introverted electronica and orchestrations.The change is a little off-putting at first. Without the propulsive dance beats of its last couple of albums, or even the seductive, dark cabaret style of its debut, 2001’s Felt Mountain, Goldfrapp’s new sound comes off as slow and safe. It’s peaceful, and it’s never bad, but it also feels a little vanilla.With each listen, though, the album gets catchier. Although it seems to lack surprises the first time through, successive listens reveal the power of its hooks, soaring synthesizers and singer Alison Goldfrapp’s vocals. They’re elements Goldfrapp has always had, but stripped of the distractions of the seductive glam and powerful dance beats that have come to characterize the group’s sound, they show Goldfrapp has enough talent to make it even without its signatures.“Little Bird,” one of Seventh Tree’s highlights, combines the best of these newly obvious strengths. It starts off with a winding synth line, then adds in Alison singing soft and low, then builds in both volume and pitch until it’s so high and enveloping that it feels like flying. Another one of the best songs on the album “A&E” uses only minimal synth and puts Alison’s crooning and one of co-member Will Gregory’s orchestrations at the forefront.The album’s only main downfall is that its lyrics can be simple. Usually they’re good, but every so often ones such as “Some people just gotta say / Some people just wanna play” (“Some People”) or “Happiness / How’d you get to be happiness?” (“Happiness”) creep up in what are otherwise profound songs.But that inconvenience aside, this is a great album. Once the initial shock wears off that Goldfrapp has shed its glitz, you’ll have Seventh Tree’s melodies stuck in your head for days.
(02/14/08 5:00am)
The bad news is it's Valentine's Day. The good news? You probably don't have a date.\nI could console you by reminding you of the freedom of being single -- that tonight, you can go out with friends, catch up on homework or finish writing that "Stargate: SG-1" fan-fiction piece. \nBut when you're lonely, none of that matters. Instead, you lapse into nostalgia about an obnoxious activity known as dating.\nIf you're being nostalgic, it's probably because you don't remember what dating is really like. Here's a refresher: It's comprised of a lot of sappy movies, slow restaurants and awkward conversations you can't wait to get out of. \nLast week, I went on a mission to cheer everyone up for Valentine's Day by collecting bad dating stories. I put an ad in the IDS asking for them, created an event on Facebook and went to downtown bars and asked IU students who were hanging out if they had any horrible dating experiences to share with WEEKEND.\nAt the bars, my requests were met with a mix of baffled looks and stories about hook-up attempts turned sour or "dates" with people they thought they were seeing who turned out to be seeing someone else. \nNot that there weren't plenty of tales worth retelling. Apparently, Bloomington is a great place for romance as long as your idea of it is poorly communicated one-nighters and plenty of alcohol.\nThe best story of my bar crawl, though, was told to me by Mitch Olsen, a 2007 IU alumnus who recently moved to St. Louis.\nHe and his friends have been trying to find women by hitting up the St. Louis bar scene. On one such venture, they went out to a bar where a band they wanted to see was playing,. Olsen convinced one of his friends to go near the stage and talk to a woman who looked "extremely attractive."\nOlsen explained: "The first thing he said was innocent enough -- 'Hey, you like the band? They're pretty good, huh?' And she ... said, 'Yes, they are really good. In fact, they play for my terminally ill son.'"\nOlsen said his friend followed the remark with an awkward silence, before responding, "Wow, that's a really nice band."\n"And then we left in shame," Olsen said. "St. Louis has been great with the co-eds so far."\nWe may not know how to make romantic connections with our fellow students, but hey, at least we have them. And of course, by mathematical law, every so often someone on this campus manages to figure out what a date is and go on one. \nOne of these students is senior James Broeker, who responded to my IDS ad with a story from last winter, when he had finally worked up the courage to ask a girl he had been talking to out on a date.\n"I was extremely excited and couldn't wait until that Friday," Broeker said in the e-mail. "This was not an ordinary date -- it required a good deal of my time, for I am at IU and she goes to school at the University of Evansville." \n"I was finally en route to rendezvous with my date when disaster struck -- a phone call from the girl. I hesitantly answered, and to my dismay she informed me she was not yet ready ... half an hour later, I arrive at the University of Evansville and call her for directions to her place. She replies she is still not ready to go, and that I should come up to her room."\nWhen he arrived at her room, she had just gotten out of the shower but said it wouldn't be much longer and kept getting ready. \n"My first 'high maintenance' alarm goes off (at this point), but I shrug it off," Broeker said.\nWhile waiting for her, her ex-boyfriend called. He had been filling up her car at the gas station.\n"Her ex-boyfriend was still taking care of her. At this point, my second 'high maintenance' alarm goes off," Broeker said.\nFinally, an hour after Broeker arrived, she was ready to spend several hours talking about herself.\n"We leave for the restaurant, and for the entire trip she talks about how she thinks she is so cute and so smart, how everyone, even people she doesn't know, thinks she is so cute, and how even her professors think she is so cute. She never once asked how I was or how my classes were going.\n" ... My final 'high maintenance' alarm was going off, and the abort foghorn was wailing at maximum capacity," Broeker said.\nBroeker called her later to tell her he wouldn't be seeing her again, only to have her respond that it wasn't a real date and they should pretend it didn't happen.\nOK, so that might not be the best example. But I swear, someone at IU has, in fact, been on a real date.\nSenior Kelli Claybourn told of the time she went to the house of a boy she was seeing her senior year of high school. His father was Iranian and served her Iranian food. Her digestive system wasn't taking well to the cultural diversity.\n"After I start to eat a little, his little sister says something like 'Good! I'm glad you're eating the food, his ex-girlfriend would never eat; we hate her.' Well obviously now I felt obligated to eat more."\nIn a great symbolic gesture about the value of dating, she soon found herself vomiting all over the bathroom, which was without toilet paper, and then vomiting again and again.\n"He promised me he wouldn't tell his family. But the next time they had dinner (something other than Iranian, thank God), his sister said, 'Hopefully you won't throw up this food.'"\nMaybe dating is dead. But if it is, we're mostly missing out on bad conversations and embarrassing situations. Happy date-free Valentine's Day.
(02/07/08 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Electronic music has an eternal problem: It sounds like it's been made on machines.
If you're a fan, its capacity to create sounds that have never been heard before and beats that transcend human abilities tends to make up for that. But every so often, an artist comes along who tries to beat electronic music's man-versus-machine nature and uses technology to make its music sound more human than any acoustic set ever could.
One of the all-time most successful winners of this war is electronic-dance group New Order, with its 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies.
The famous cover of Power, Corruption & Lies, a revamping of a French Romantic flower basket painting that contrasts with some incoherent colored blocks in the top-right corner, establishes the album's odd contradictions just by looking at it.
But in case you overlooked the strangely haunting cover, the high bass-line melody that opens the album on "Age of Consent" brings New Order's enigma into focus. The bass line feels awkward and alienating, not unlike the queasy attraction of liking someone slightly out of your league.
It feeds into lead singer Bernard Sumner's pubescent-sounding voice. He doesn't want to talk about what's wrong; he doesn't care about the relationship he just gave up on and he's come to accept what's happened. It sounds like a list of reasons for not writing a song, except that when he puts them together, they contradict and confound, creating a lyrical puzzle.
As it turns out, he's in the mental turmoil of knowing what the right thing is to do and not being able to do it. It's not your standard club-music lyrical fare. But then, neither is the ethereal synthesizer solo -- still one of the most beautiful ever recorded -- that follows those lyrics.
The combination "Age of Consent" sets up is New Order's calling card -- innovative instrumentals just off-putting enough to be desirable, enigmatic lyrics that make you think and lush synth lines that fill in the gaps of thought where vocals and traditional instruments can't.
Power, Corruption & Lies' main theme is immaturity -- ironic considering its weight -- or at least, immaturity as the world would define it. More specifically, it's about exploring the difference between being mature enough to know what the world wants from you and being too immature or resistant to do it. Even at its most immature moments, though, the album never comes off as annoying. Its most defining lyric comes at the end of "Your Silent Face," in which Sumner sings almost in a whisper, "You've caught me at a bad time / So why don't you piss off?" It could have easily come off as juvenile whining, but surrounded by the majestic, introspective synth and slight but hooky guitar and bass, it becomes eloquent as well as funny.
New Order constantly makes the awkward flaws of youth eloquent. In "The Village," Sumner sings, "Our love is like the flowers, the rain the sea and the hours ... Oh, our love is like the Earth, the Sun, the trees and the birth."
It's so corny it's almost creepy, but sung with confused passion, backed by endearing sequencer patterns and that high bass, its innocent frustration makes it hard not to love.
The closer "Leave Me Alone" wraps up the album in a typical New Order album-ending fashion -- that is, with the least memorable song. In yet another contradiction, this makes the song memorable because you spend time dwelling on why the band could possibly think that was a good closing song.
It drones on with a simple beat, repetitive guitar line and rhyming lyrics, which feature lines such as, "From my head to my toes / To my teeth to my nose / You get these words wrong ... Leave me alone." In other words, the last lines of the album insult the listener and tell them to go away. It is, of course, a brilliant strategy to make them listen again.
Power, Corruption & Lies gives in to the imperfections of being a living human and turns them in on themselves.
(01/15/08 12:27am)
For quite a while now, I’ve been hearing outbursts from IU students making one particular argument that I’ve felt amounted to little more than sensory judgment. \nThe argument is easy to identify by its high ratio of name-checked cultural fad terms to actual argumentative content, and by its inevitable brevity, as it’s hard to say a whole lot about something you haven’t thought out past your instincts. \nIt sounds something like this: “These days, it’s like, everyone’s logging onto MySpace, Generation Y needs constant stimulation, everyone’s taking Adderall and people just want to read about Paris Hilton.” \nMaybe “argument” is a loose word for what’s going on in this hipster trend buzz talk. But what people who babble on in this way are getting at is this: The more omnipresent the media becomes in our lives, the shorter our attention spans are and the more shallow we get in our thought processes. \nA particularly good counterexample to this showed up in the New York Times last week. The Times ran an article about findings by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that said 61 percent of Americans with a broadband internet connection had been to the library in the past year whereas only 39 percent of Americans without one had. Furthermore, 18- to 30-year-olds were the age group that visited libraries most often. \nCorrelation isn’t causation, but one feasible explanation for this is that, contrary to the panicked trend-talkers, the “information superhighway” isn’t giving us all we want so fast that it’s shrinking our attention spans to a length too short to get out of our computer chairs. Rather, it’s providing us with a place to gather more information than we ever could before and therefore allowing us to develop a wider collection of interests in what we now know is out there – and a greater amount of information about those interests. \nAnother explanation might be that the Internet generates a greater interest in reading generally. With the Internet, it’s free and easy to read multiple major newspapers as well as find a wide variety of alternative news sources that individuals find more appealing than anything they could have found locally on paper, making them want to read when they wouldn’t have done so at all otherwise. And blogs, of course, lead people to read up on all kinds of opinions they wouldn’t have known about otherwise. \nIn any case, this relationship between books and the Internet shows that the time we spend in front of our computers not only doesn’t appear to be leading us further down the path of becoming hedonistic automatons, it actually seems to make us more interested and passionate about intellectual pursuits.
(01/11/08 1:29am)
It took me a long time to like \nRon Paul. \nI, like a lot of non-right-leaning libertarians, have always been at odds with many of his positions. I don’t agree with his anti-abortion stance, for instance, nor am I a fan of his beliefs about immigration. \nDespite those two issues, about which I have particularly strong opinions, I found a lot to like in Ron Paul. The man has provided well-researched, logical reasoning on why we should be out of the Middle East, rather than just spouting off well-worded emotional appeals. I have also been particularly impressed by his interests in traditionally liberal concerns, such as protecting the environment and improving the economy to help the working class, without the traditionally liberal position of throwing tax money at those problems in whichever way happens to be most politically advantageous. \nMost of all, though, I jumped on the Ron Paul bandwagon to show my support for libertarian positions getting a chance in the spotlight, where people can see that we have reasonable, creative views worth serious consideration. \nBut like nearly everyone who has been on the Internet lately, I was shocked and disturbed by the unashamedly racist, paranoid newsletter snippets that had been sent out under Paul’s name during a span of about 20 years, which James Kirchick published Tuesday in his New Republic article “Angry White Man.”\nYes, Paul issued a statement saying he was not involved with the newsletters’ content, that they were published while he was out of Congress practicing as a doctor and that he takes responsibility for not having paid attention to what was being done under his name. Yes, even if Paul was racist at one point in time he seems to have no sympathies thereof now. And yes, Kirchick’s timely publishing of his article was a dirty political move. \nBut none of that totally excuses the newsletters’ content, and even if Paul did come forward with a satisfactory explanation of his distance from them, he has endangered libertarian ideology of being viewed in the mainstream as a position of psychotic bigots. \nSo let me set the record straight. \nFor mainstream libertarians, issues such as withdrawal from the WTO, abolishment of the Federal Reserve, elimination of various bureaucracies and getting our troops off the Arabian peninsula have nothing to do with racism or conspiratorial paranoia. We hold these positions because we believe putting them into action would improve our economy and national security. \nFurthermore, we hold many opinions that counter bigotry. We want to end the federal war on drugs in large part because of its racist, classist prejudices. We want the government to give individuals more opportunities to choose their own groups rather than give privileges to certain groups that more often than not have power or money politicians want. \nIf your only introduction to libertarianism has been through Paul, I encourage you to give our philosophy a closer look. And no matter your opinion of the man, remember most libertarians advocate the opposite of bigotry.
(11/29/07 5:00am)
After the release of the Gorillaz's 2005 album Demon Days, front man Damon Albarn declared the album would be the band's last. And it was an ideal stopping point: It's hard to see how a group could improve on having successfully lived up to its pretensions to create an album capturing the spirit of the post-9/11 world.\nSo why ruin that finale by tossing the public a collection of second-rate recordings? Probably because someone wanted money. But that aside, D-Sides is worth its release for the light it sheds on some of the fascinating aspects of Demon Days' peripheral vision. \nD-Sides has two discs: One of b-sides and demos and one of remixes of Demon Days songs. \nThe b-sides and demos range from numbers to get your hips moving, such as the ironically bouncy "We Are Happy Landfill," to the reggae-knockoff demo of "Don't Get Lost in Heaven" to introspective songs that reach for the sublime, such as the ethereal "Hong Kong" and the god-like power of "Murdoc Is God." \nBut the collection doesn't take itself too seriously. One of its best moments is "Rockit," in which the usually dramatic, pretentious Albarn raps in a detached and dry tone, "Don't you get too close or I'll blah blah blah blah blah / Stick it up your nose blah blah blah blah blah blah blah."\nThere's not a bad song on the demo disc, though none of them hold a candle to the ingenuity of Demon Days. But maybe that's the point. Demon Days, with its exploration of the boundaries between feeling and reality, could seem enigmatic. D-Sides doesn't solve that enigma, but it provides a bigger picture of how it developed. \nThe disc of remixes, on the other hand, seems to exist for the purpose of raising the album's price tag $8. \nD-Sides' main merit is its behind-the-scenes look at the making of Demon Days. Maybe only die-hard fans will be intrigued, and it's hardly worth its two-disc status. But it is worth a listen or two for every Gorillaz fan.
(11/29/07 1:51am)
Ah, Facebook. You used to have so much integrity.\nBack in the day, you helped me network only with my friends at elite and major state universities and your main gimmick was that people could identify potential new friends based on their tastes in music, movies and books.\nAnd now you have sold your soul to materialism. It’s no wonder that your new ad campaign, in which you put users’ third-party purchases in their News Feeds unless they actively change their settings, has incurred the wrath of users who don’t want to automatically be made pawns to capitalism. \nMoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green complained, “(Facebook’s) policy (on the new ads) remains opt-out instead of opt-in, their opt-outs remain well hidden, and if someone does jump through the hoops of opting out, it only applies to purchases made on one external Web site instead of all sites.”\nWelcome to capitalism, MoveOn.\nManeuvering the capitalistic market requires learning the art of “opting out,” or choosing not to engage with advertising. \nThe purpose of advertising is to hide from the consumers the idea that they could opt out. Advertising would not be as effective if it had an “opt-in” strategy, where it showed the consumer that it would be equally logical of them to engage or not engage in the consumption culture of the advertised product because people would rather save their energy if given the option. The purpose of advertising, then, is to try to override the appearance of that option.\nKudos to MoveOn for pointing out the subtlety of Facebook’s strategy, but it’s looking to the wrong group for change. Even if businesses make their advertising campaigns more transparent, they are still using the same strategy of trying to convert consumers.\nIt’s the consumer’s job, therefore, to always be working to gain a better understanding of when and how advertising is trying to grab them. Opting out doesn’t come as easily as it sounds because businesses actively try to prevent consumers from doing it.\nOf course, a major part of MoveOn’s argument is that Facebook putting business’ interests in selling their stuff ahead of its consumers’ interest in their privacy is not just an immoral but also a dangerous business move.\nIn other words, Facebook should instead have an opt-in policy for its users to socially network on its social-networking site.\nFacebook’s attempts to push the bar further when it comes to decreased privacy have continually been met with criticism. But given that users eventually come to accept these extensions, that criticism seems to be due more to the idea that privacy can be breached that far than the fact that it is.\nPushing those boundaries of privacy is yet another business move, but it’s one that thus far seems to be working well. \nFacebook is a business, and it won’t be adopting opt-in strategies so long as it keeps getting users to spend time on the site and increase its advertisers’ revenue. Instead, as users, we need to make ourselves aware of how to opt out.
(11/08/07 5:00am)
If a movie's status as an epic were determined by its number of characters, plotlines and pop-philosophy themes, "Spider-Man 3" would be one of the greatest movies ever made.\nAnd indeed the movie's makers seem to suffer from this delusion, believing that the more material a movie takes on, the more brain activity its audience will have to involve in watching it.\nBut what actually happens is that it creates so many isolated lines of thought that when the end of the movie tries to spin them into a cohesive web, it doesn't quite work. By then, so many characters, plotlines and themes have remained undeveloped that it's hard to remember what was going on the last time they were involved, 45 minutes ago.\nPeter Parker, a.k.a., Spider-Man (Tobey McGuire) thinks everything is finally going his way. Spider-Man is all over newspaper and magazine fronts, his girlfriend Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) has made it as a Broadway singer and his best-friend-turned-enemy Harry Osborn (James Franco) loses his memory in a fight and forgets he had been trying to kill Spider-Man. \nThen, before he knows it, Spider-Man has been overtaken by an aggression-hungry symbiote, Mary Jane gets fired and breaks up with Peter for being insensitive about it, Harry gets his memory back, a new journalist at Peter's paper the Daily Bugle named Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) one-ups Peter's photography and an escaped convict gets stuck in a particle accelerator and turns into a city-destroying sandman.\nGet all that? \nThe movie's attempts to philosophize add to the confusion. \nWhile its main theme is clearly free will vs. predestination, it spends the vast majority of screen time exploring sub-themes that don't quite tie into the main one: the critic vs. the everyman, the free man's prejudice against the imprisoned man, forgiveness, the mystique of love and how biology can overwhelm character. \n"Spider-Man 3," does, however, have its antidotes. Peter's anorexic-looking neighbor Ursula (Mageina Tovah), who is always baking in the kitchen, serves up several laughs. And the symbiote that induces Peter briefly to become a badass also apparently induces him to look like he just dropped out of a goth-rock band.\nAnd, despite being hard to follow, the movie rarely gets boring. It keeps a steady pace, and its characters are lively, if flat.\nThe special features are pretty good. They contain separate commentaries by the director/cast and filmmakers, and there's an impressive gallery of pictures, some of which show how they did the special effects. They also have a music video for the Snow Patrol song "Signal Fire," which isn't bad if you're into Snow Patrol and cute children.\nHad it narrowed its focus, "Spider-Man 3" could have come closer to that epic it was trying to be.
(11/08/07 12:35am)
Thanks to Provost Karen Hanson’s e-mail last week, the topic of the smoking ban has seen renewed outrage across campus. I, for one, was enchanted by Hanson’s easygoing attitude toward grammar and sense. Here is her e-mail, with my thoughts italicized:\nAs you may know, Indiana University has made a determination (Has made a determination = has decided. Hire a proofreader, Karen Hanson.) that it will be tobacco-free on all its campuses by January 2008.\nIn compliance with this mandate (which the University itself mandated) and in order to promote a healthy environment (that also has a traffic problem and makes a killing off junk food) for all members of the campus community (most of whom binge-drink and smoke on weekends) IU-Bloomington has adopted a tobacco policy that can (can = may) be found at this Web site: http://www.smokefree.indiana.edu/IUB_Tobacco_Policy.pdf (a Web site that no one with an ambivalent interest in the information will visit and that only exists so that the University doesn’t look secretive about its policies).\nImplementation of the policy will depend upon the cooperation of all of us, and we want civility (smoking is for anarchists) and collegial good will (goodwill) to guide us (impersonal, relative values must guide us because too many actual people would see how inane the policy is) through this transition (which will ultimately be no transition because this ban is unenforceable).\nWe expect courtesy on all sides (even if you think this smoking ban is unacceptably absurd) as information about the policy is disseminated (which comes from the same Latin root as “semen,” not that anyone here is getting off on power) and as compliance is requested (but not after compliance is requested).\nThose who would like assistance in the form of tobacco cessation programs (and these people will invade the Health Center en masse, because it’s easier to quit smoking than to walk off campus to smoke) should know that, within the next few weeks, IU will announce a new tobacco cessation benefit for full-time academic staff and employees.\n(The new benefit will be paid for by IU (your tuition money, kids!) and will be available starting November 1, 2007. (Didn’t she just say this will start “in the next few weeks”?) More information, including a telephone number (you know you’re old and out of touch when you say “telephone number”) for enrollment, is available in the Open Enrollment materials.)\nThe Health and Wellness Department of the Health Center already offers, free of charge, smoking cessation programs for students\n(and, according to the Health Center Web site, to all IU employees. That’s right – not only will employee cessation programs be made available to employees “in the next few weeks” and “starting November 1,” they are already being offered). (For more information, call 855-7338.) Currently under construction, a new Web site will supply additional information about IU’s tobacco policy and its implementation. (The Web site address is: http://smokefree.indiana.edu.)\n(It might get a few hits. At least the URL is shorter than the last one.)\nThank you for your cooperation.
(10/24/07 11:17pm)
This week, Stephen Colbert and Chuck Norris might have pushed the Republican presidential candidate race from being a source of groaning to a source of laughter. But Fred Thompson has managed to rise above such external satire – he makes fun of himself. \nThompson seems like a nice guy, and nice guys have been hard to come by in this race. The power-hungry, big-government politicians have taken over, leaving plenty of room for complaining about the nasty nature of politics in America. \nThompson, then, the less politically refined senator who comes from that medium known as television, which is more comprehensible to us than high-brow political talk shows, should have a space as a candidate of the people. But the people don’t want a candidate of them, and Thompson shows why not.\nHe caught flack this week when he responded to press questioning about why he has not been visiting early voting states as much as other candidates. He shot back that he had “been to Florida three or four times.”\nHe then went on to say, “The mainstream media, with all due respect, likes to concentrate on the process game on a daily basis, and I can’t get caught up in that. I’m going to do it the way I want to do it.”\nMaybe he does know what he’s doing, and maybe before we realize it, he will be pulling off the most brilliant, unorthodox campaign strategy in history. After all, a lot of Americans also hate the mainstream press, and I’m sure many can relate to Thompson’s inability to remember whether he did something that is vital to his career. \nBut the mainstream media, no matter how obnoxious, also controls who does well in a race. Providing them with quotable idiocy, then insulting them, is a quick route to turning your campaign into a joke. \nEven when Thompson isn’t patronizing the media, however, his lack of skill in dealing with them hurts him. \nAfter he first announced his campaign, he received a fair amount of hopeful attention for being a potential outsider-savior to this race. But since he started participating in debates earlier this month, that hope has turned to disappointment. In debates, he constantly stutters, doesn’t maintain eye contact and rambles. \nArguably, Thompson has plenty of time to improve, and the presidential race as it stands now is more about developing the issues than about how well the individual candidates are doing. And when it comes to issues, he has been developing a strong platform, as evidenced by his popularity at the Values Voters Summit last week. \nBut the media may or may not allow him time to get his act together, and if he doesn’t, his chances are shot, no matter how much fresh air he can provide to the stale presidential race.\nAmericans don’t vote for candidates who are down-to-earth, straight-talking nice guys. In media coverage, they come across as limp. Instead, Americans vote for political forces who command their attention – and the adoration of the mainstream media.