Looks good so far

This is my version of red beans and rice: I made a big pot of rice on Friday, added canned diced tomatoes, diced white onions, canned red kidney beans, salt, green chile powder, cumin, and tapatio hot sauce. It needs a heavier dose of the spices, but it’s pretty good. I just heated up a portion in the microwave, added some cheddar cheese and sour cream, and now, I’m about to eat it, while listening to the Beasties.

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The music of the Beastie Boys usually helps me to smile, laugh, and put aside the dramas and stresses of life. Most of the lyrics and music are really positive and energetic. The beats make me want to dance and move around, or at least, bob my head.

I don’t have a favorite Beastie. They’re all part of the sound: Mike D, Ad Rock, MCA, DJ Hurricane, and the many other musicians, producers, and artists who work with them.

This CD is an EP that was released as a “maxi-single” for the single, “Root Down”. It has three different versions of that song and 7 live songs that ROCK! Maybe singles aren’t your thing, because you’d rather buy the album the single was released on. However, if you are a Beasties fan, then you must own this CD. The remixes of “Root Down”, alone, are worth the cost of the CD, but the live tracks are great: “Sabrosa”, “Time To Get Ill”, “The Maestro”, “Heart Attack Man”, “Flute Loop”, “Something’s Got To Give”, and “Time For Livin’”. Then, there are some hidden goodies tacked onto the ends of some of the tracks, after some blank space, like someone singing, in what sounds like Japanese, over “So Wat’cha Want”.

It will make you want to move around.

docrivs.com

This blog, hurtyoubad, was at the top on Technorati for the tag “”http://www.technorati.com/tags/graffiti">graffiti". I thought I’d share it. If you like to look at some good writing, some brash bombing, and some mad graffiti skills, then you should check out this site.

I’ve been known to stare at walls and trains that were painted with huge graffiti pieces ever since I was about 11 or 12. There are pieces that I saw then, in 1983 and 1984, that I can still see in my mind. Those pieces were stylized logos created by some graffiti artist for early hardcore punk bands, DK (the Dead Kennedys) and Minor Threat, amongst others. The Minor Threat piece was done with a black sploch explosion, white lettering, with an almost fluorescent outline of the explosion. I thought it was pretty cool, and it made me want to be a writer.

I also remember the tag of the artist I suspect bombed the wall of the underside of a bridge in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a town I lived in when I was young. He was known as “Bonesy”, and he was most famous for stealing a Cadillac, getting toasted, and driving at high speeds, fleeing from the police. He wrapped that Cadillac around a tree and lost his life as a result of that adventure. There was a memorial at the Middle School that I was attending when he died. I don’t know if I ever met him or not, but I saw photos of him, and I think I’d seen him around. The mystery of who was the writer of the tags on the bridge was solved for me, though, as far as I was concerned. I don’t know how old Bonesy was when he died, but he certainly wasn’t past his 20’s.

During that time period, break dancing, rap music (before it was called “hip hop”), and graffiti writing was becoming popularized in the shopping malls, the street, movies, TV, music, and album covers. MTV was new then – just a few years old. We didn’t even have the connections for cable in our neighborhood.

I did try my hand at writing; I bought some krylon. I made my block letters and outlines. My pieces were mostly on surfaces that were by the water. I used sea walls, the undersides of docks, rock outcroppings, and stairways that led down to the beaches. There were maybe five or six of them that I did – all of them in black, blue, and white.

Back then, I didn’t think to take photos of my pieces. I guess I saw them so often that I took them for granted and thought I’d always be around to see them and show them off.

Now, I’m not associated with the graffiti movement anymore, but the graffiti culture and the history of that culture still fascinates me. But, most of all, it’s the pieces that fascinate me. It’s my inability to be able to read the writing that usually keeps me staring, trying to make out what the piece says. Sometimes I think I get it; other times I can’t figure it out. However, as art goes, it doesn’t always matter whether you get it or not; what matters is that it moves you and you remember it.

Wrote a song about it. Here it go.

This movie discussed the topics of germ warfare, the “Cassandra Complex”, time travel, mental illness and perception, and environmental/social activism, amongst other things.

These are some of my favorite lyrics that I came up with as a result of closely watching and analyzing this film one day in 1996.

I spied this book on a friend’s bookshelf last Monday, and I flipped through it, half-watching the Steelers lose. In the Table of Contents I could see how the chapters focus on different subgroups, social groups, and subcultures of the Medieval Era. I seem to recall chapters on “deviants” and “outcasts” that looked pretty interesting to me. I was told that I could borrow it – it’s “a bit boring”, I was told. However, I won’t have the time to read it right away. The subject interests me, especially after reading Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Penitentiary (I might not have that title exactly correct), by Michael Foucault, back about 9 or 10 years ago. The ‘spectacle of corporeal punishment’ is a subject that is very relevant today, especially when viewed from a historical perspective, and an anthropological perspective. We are still fighting “just wars” and deciding whether or not it is okay to torture our “war criminals”. Also, religion and politics are still (will they ever not be?) intertwined, which sometimes makes me recall my lessons about the Medieval Era, the Plague, and the Inquisition. I also grew up in and around Boston, Massachusetts, and the Salem Witch Trials are a part of the history of that area. So, on a more casual level, the subject of Middle Age culture and ways of thinking and believing are a reflection of how we think and believe today.

A Beautiful Mind has some twists and turns in it that make it really interesting. If the secrets have not already been spoiled for you by other people who have seen it before, then you will enjoy picking up on these clever tricks of storytelling.

There is an article on the movie in Wikipedia for you to check out.

The character that this movie is based on, John Forbes Nash Jr., the genius mathematician who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the “game theory” of economics, is a very intriguing character, as well. The sheer uniqueness of this character, distinct thought patterns, eccentricities of habit, and looks (although I’m not sure that I think that the actor portraying him, Russell Crowe, looks like the real man), remind me somewhat of my own father’s eccentricities (that I have come to love and value very much).

I did not know that Philip Seymour Hoffman had won any awards for his role in Capote until my wife showed me the DVD box at the video store, reminding me that we had both said that we wanted to see it, after seeing the preview once before. From what I recall from the notes on the box, he won an Academy Award for Best Actor. Hoffman’s performance in this movie definitely did not disappoint, as so often these “Award Winner”s do to me. I was impressed also with the actors who played Nel Harper Lee, Alvin the Sherriff, Perry, Dick, and many of the other characters who supported the story.

The movie was rather “dark and artsy” as TajLV commented, but I don’t think that a light and documentary-like theme to the movie would have been appropriate at all. The “film noir” aspect to many of the jailhouse, interview, and bed scenes (scenes of Capote, in midst of deep depression, not salubrious and carnal sex scenes), with the juxtaposition of the “ha ha! Listen to me!” Hollywood-like world of famous, celebrity writers was very effective.

Why do I say effective? The effect, for me, was to show how Capote’s internal descent into the creation of In Cold Blood, a novel which has been sitting amongst the other books on my bedroom floor, unread, for years. It could be called ironic that the writer’s surging and legendary ascent in the industry and culture of America was accompanied by the writer’s deep, dark, and very real descent into alcoholism and depression.

The notes before the final credits rolled provided information about this descent. Apparently, Capote became one of the most famous writers in American history, as a result of In Cold Blood, and he never finished another novel after it was published. Also, he died in 1984, of complications due to alcoholism.

There are many questions that I think the movie, Capote raised. For one, did Perry really carry out those murders, as his story was depicted in the movie – as if he were a practiced, professional killer who snapped – or did he tell Capote what the writer wanted to hear, so that this book would become what it was destined to become? Two, did Capote play the role of a friend in order to get the story, or while getting the story did Capote’s feelings for Perry grow into a set of affectionate and loving feelings for the condemned man? Three, why is it that I did not know that Harper Lee, who wrote one of my most favorite stories of all time, To Kill A Mockingbird, was a friend and writer’s research assistant to Truman Capote during the time that she was trying to get her novel finished?

Overall, I’d say this is a good Hollywood-icized version of the story of Truman Capote’s experiences in researching material for one of the most famous novels in American literature (which I plan to read someday :D). If you are a murder trial movie fan, then I think that you might appreciate the way that the 1950s justice system was portrayed in this movie, as well as the relationship between law enforcement and a famous, big-city writer.

So far (I’m only on chapter 2 – From Macros to Modules), this book clearly explains the more advanced aspects of developing applications, using Microsoft Access and the Visual Basic programming language. It skips over the more basic skills that you need to develop with Access, which is why I picked this one. It doesn’t go into much detail about programming or development. It covers the basics of many essential skills and prepares you for the only real way to effectively learn: to DO it. I am glad that I found this book. The skills I need to improve are programming and development skills, not how to use the GUI to create a pretty form.