Pictures of the New and Improved Bedroom...

C'mon ladies, line forms out the door har har.

Drugs, Rock and Politics:
Pearl Jam’s Epic Wake Up Call to the Filthy Masses. Final Version

The hippy-haze air was thick. Night sky and moon were within grabbing distance. Everything fueled by an adrenaline feed straight from the pumping hearts of the drug zombies sparked and lit ablaze when Eddie Vedder’s prophetic pipes echoed off the Tennessee horizon spawning what would become Pearl Jam’s most epic performance. We all saw Christ that night and it wasn’t because of the drugs.
Vedder and the band eased into the three hour long set, which included a shit ton of rarities as well as Pearl Jam staples, with Hard to Imagine. Vedder belted the chorus, “Things were different then”. Ah yes Eddie, things were different; the world loved us and we all left rainbow shits behind in toilet bowls everywhere. Pearl Jam reminded Bonnaroo how fucking sweet the 90’s were and how fucking shitty things are getting. Vedder spoke candidly following shouts of Fuck George Bush, “A lot of fucking emotions flying around the world these days…So you’ve got a Texan in the White House and it (gas) goes from $1.40 to $4.00 a gallon. I’m not good at math, I’m going to let you do that.” Vedder interjected little snippets of politics throughout the show in true Eddie Vedder fashion; unfortunately, the only thing he stirred up was the acid vibrations that moved spontaneously through the crowd. Bonnaroo is a great place to get people together but you have to speak through the drugs first. Reign O’er Me was one of the highlights of the night, Vedder released an atom bomb over the crowd vaporizing everything within 2 miles with his nuclear vocals.
Pearl Jam continued towards the 2nd encore and Vedder, visibly exhausted, wailed and groaned his way from an amazing rendition of Black to a ten minute goliath jam of Porch. The man standing beside me just stared in shock at the stage, I nudged him, “Dude are you ok?” “Yea man, I just forgot where I was for a minute there, this is intense”. It was intense. Anybody who has ever been to one of these monster festivals knows all it takes is a bad batch of mushrooms and one crazy fuck to turn the grounds into a free-for-all of dripping sex and bloody violence.
Encore numero dos highlighted my two personal favorite Pearl Jam songs, Release and Alive. Release was haunting with Vedder’s lulling ooo’s and ahhh’s. Lighter’s sparked and many went inside their heads for the trip. Alive, on the other hand, revved the crowd into a state of frenzy. The man beside me sang at the top of his fucking lungs words that he wasn’t quite sure of, thrusting a closed fist weakly into the humid air. The crowd followed in suit but most knew the words better than my sidekick.
Luckily, Vedder and company stuck around for a third amazing encore. Vedder closed the show with a rocking cover of Dylan’s All Along the Watch Tower. The stage blew open into chaos, Manchester lost control. Eddie Vedder screamed, “Two riders were approachin!” again and again. Mega solo after mega solo, energy, blam, crash and afterglow. Peace. Cheering crowd. It was over. Pearl Jam had played the best show of the weekend. “Dude, that just fucking happened man”, I said to the man drooling beside me. “What happened? Was that Dylan?”, my random concert buddy blankly walked away into the festival still dazed by his overdose of psychedelics and the come down from the ecstasy he found on the ground earlier in the day.

The Move and the New Apartment.


First of all I would like to say, it's interesting how things just magically dissapear while moving... I would take pictures of the new place BUT the usb cord to my awesome digital camera is missing. I would ride my bike to walmart to buy another one BUT my quick release axel is missing so normally I would just listen to some tunes from my external hard drive BUT the usb cable to that is missing as well.

Classes start tomorrow bright and early at 8am (the art of acting). I can't wait although I'm not sure how I'm getting to class yet. I'll probably just walk.


More later.

Here's my buzzbin magazine article so far on Pearl Jam's Bonnaroo performance in June:

Drugs, Rock and Politics:
Pearl Jam’s Epic Wake Up Call to the Filthy Masses.

The hippy-haze air was thick. Night sky and moon were within grabbing distance. Everything fueled by an adrenaline feed straight from the pumping hearts of the drug zombies sparked and lit ablaze when Eddie Vedder’s prophetic pipes echoed off the Tennessee horizon spawning what would become Pearl Jam’s most epic performance. We all saw Christ that night and it wasn’t because of the drugs.
Vedder and the band eased into the three hour long set, which included a shit ton of rarities as well as Pearl Jam staples, with Hard to Imagine. Vedder belted the chorus, “Things were different then”. Ah yes Eddie, things were different; the world loved us and we all left rainbow shits behind in toilet bowls everywhere. Pearl Jam reminded Bonnaroo how fucking sweet the 90’s were and how fucking shitty things are getting. Vedder spoke candidly above shouts of Fuck George Bush, “A lot of fucking emotions flying around the world these days…So you’ve got a Texan in the White House and it (gas) goes from $1.40 to $4.00 a gallon. I’m not good at math, I’m going to let you do that.” Vedder interjected little snippets of politics throughout the show in true Eddie Vedder fashion; unfortunately, the only thing he stirred up was the acid vibrations that moved spontaneously through the crowd. Bonnaroo is a great place to get people together but you have to speak through the drugs first. Reign O’er Me was one of the highlights of the night, Vedder released an atom bomb over the crowd vaporizing everything within 2 miles with his nuclear vocals.
Pearl Jam continued towards the 2nd encore and Vedder, visibly exhausted, wailed and groaned his way from an amazing rendition of Black to a ten minute goliath jam of Porch. The man standing beside me just stared in shock at the stage, I nudged him, “Dude are you ok?” “Yea man, I just forgot where I was for a minute there, this is intense”. It was intense. Anybody who has ever been to one of these monster festivals knows all it takes is a bad batch of mushrooms and one crazy fuck to turn the grounds into a free-for-all of dripping sex and bloody violence.
Luckily, Vedder controlled Bonnaroo for a third encore. More to come…

I'll be changing things around and adding a bit more to the end. This is just a rough draft.

R.I.P Isaac Hayes

He was an RnB legend

and Chef from Southpark

Here's to you Isaac!

Attention:

My Piece of Crap Grammar Paper Written in an Hour! Go Forth and Get me that Slacker's Grade!!!
(Seriously, I can do so much better than this, I just want to get this freaking class over with)

The Great Grammar Debate


Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most unpredictable, dramatic and funny men of his time. Those qualities carry on through his writing. Thompson’s style is akin to a commuter train crash, one sympathizes with the passengers and is in horror by the event but, cannot help but be stunned and wowed by the calamity of it all. Thompson’s writing has an element of danger to it. Thus, I chose Hunter S. Thompson’s first novel, The Rum Diary, to examine further. The Rum Diary chronicles his days as a free-lance journalist in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. I will be juxtaposing his novel with a short story I wrote titled Nocturnal Emissions, a twisted depiction of the college life style.
The first major difference I noticed was sentence length. Thompson slowly draws the majority of his sentences out like a bow then he fires a fury of words in shorter, starker sentences. He does this consistently throughout The Rum Diary. Thompson balances Hemmingway’s directness with Fitzgerald’s beautiful descriptions. One sentence in particular is a whopping 162 words long and describes a mile long walk through the streets of San Juan. The sentence acts as a timeline, listing each tiny discovery as if Thompson wants us to illustrate the scene for him with slides. Thompson is using long drawn out sentences to give the reader a feeling of a casual and leisurely environment. How else can anybody describe Puerto Rico? One can almost imagine Thompson sitting at his typewriter slowly writing out his words with a cigar in his mouth and a bottle of warm rum sitting beside him on his desk with the ocean breeze coming in through a curtained window. If he wanted to speed things up a bit, he would have used shorter sentences that are more frantic and emotionally jabbing. But, Thompson takes his time.
On the other hand, when I wrote my story I wanted to play with a very stark and quick rhythm in memory of Bukowski and inspired by Hemingway. Much of my story is dialogue, short and blunt phrases. The short sentences add to the confusion of the whole piece, the sentences never give you a second to catch up. The voice of my narrator is sarcastic and belittling. I didn’t want the reader to have much “fluff” as it were. I didn’t want to slow things down. I wanted to go at the reader like Muhammad Ali. Although my story breaks most grammatical rules, I get my point across. My story is not meant to be taken seriously however, Hunter’s novel is meant to be read with seriousness.
In every creative writing class I have ever taken, the use of strong verbs is always a topic of discussion and I never understood why until now. I’m beginning to wake up from my verb dark age into an age of verb enlightenment thanks to Thompson. Thompson packs his sentences with wild verbs like warped, barking, marveling, and zipping. Verbs are a very important part of his writing. The verbs he chooses add to the character of each sentence. He also uses verbs in nontraditional ways as well. Normally barking would refer to animal noises but he uses the word in relation to one person talking to another. A large amount of colorful verbs seems to add a bit of life to any writing.
Unfortunately, for me, in my writing I use rather dull and gray verbs for the most part. My attention to short and stark sentences limited my use of strong verbs and I believe some of my sentences seem boring because of it. The verbs I chose all coincide with the every day usage and meaning of the verb. I think it makes for an overall monotone affect. Perhaps in the future I will spend greater time constructing sentences with varied verbs to increase the energy of the writing.
The overall feel of Thompson’s novel and my short story are completely different. The style of Thompson and the style I chose for my short story are completely different. I always considered Thompson a great influence on my own writing but apparently, I don’t write like him, I just write in the spirit of him. It’s interesting but I always thought my writing was very similar to his. The feel of The Rum Diary is one of a relaxed vacation filled with innocent adventures and warm Puerto Rican rum. Hunter makes sure to reflect that in the structure of his writing. In Nocturnal Emissions, the feel is of confusion, annoyance, and hilarity. I’m not as skilled at writing as I would like to think but, much of the emotion does come through structurally even though it may be accidental. Finally, as Hunter would call it, the wisdom. To keep a reader interested, it is not always the content that counts; sentence structure and variation has a lot to do with keeping a reader reading.

The Rum Diary



Well, it's official, The Rum Diary movie is going to happen, is happening now and will be done with production shortly. I'm stoked. The Rum Diary was Hunter S. Thompson's first novel written in the 1950's. The book chronicles his time as a freelance journalist in Puerto Rico. Basically, the movie is a "sequel" to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Johnny Depp is reprising his role as Hunter and a few other familiar faces are going to appear in the movie as well. It'll be released sometime in 2009 I think. I'm stoked.

B.B. King- The Master and Architect


I'm listening to BB's performance at Bonnaroo this year. I was there but, I just had to find a bootlegged copy. Holy shit he's awesome. BB is the grandfather of modern blues and he acts like it too. On stage, BB brought the audience in to a candid (and wisdom filled) performance that poured from his 82 year old blue heart. When I die, I want BB to be the person who greets me at the pearly gates with his rendition of "You are my Sunshine". Nough said, he's fucking awesome and nobody has any reason to believe otherwise. God Bless the Grandfather of Blues. (I'm not even religious)

Live performances have always been my favorite they really show what a band is capable of. What happens in the studio doesn't mean much to me at all, it's constructed, planned and tainted by retakes, rewinds and electronics. If a band can give a good live performance they are good enough for me. Radio head, on Monday, gave an "OK" performance. I'm starting to believe they are a studio band unfortunately. Although, they did give a grand performance at Bonnaroo in 06.

By far, the best live band I have seen thus far has been The Raconteurs. Jack White knows how to get a crowd going.

Again the clock hits 4:56... It's a curse I swear

Busy week ahead. Packing, Cleaning, Studying for my Final, Moving, Working, Painting. Where has the summer gone? It seems like it was just yesterday when I walked outside and smiled at the first summer breeze. I'll be busy to the bluesy beat of B.B King.

My Buzzbin Magazine Article:

I just want it to be known, buzzbinmagazine.com screwed up with the credits to my article. Apparently they believe somebody else wrote it. I'm going to talk to them about it asap.

Start drinking those Pina Coladas and eating handfuls of psychedelics because Morning Bell has crafted a damn good album that mixes Mai Tai warmth with groovy escapism. Through the Belly of the Sea makes Sponge Bob Square Pants look like a fucking pussy.
Through the Belly is a concept album based on those “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” books everybody reads as a kid. It’s interesting. Each track tells a bit of a narrative while you listen. Unfortunately, the concept feels loose and doesn’t bring much to the table other than an interesting marketing ploy. The concept is easy to forget.
What is lacking in terms of concept is forgiven once the album plays a few times in your stereo. I found myself lulled by the mellow melodies anchored by nebulous guitar work and jazzy drumming. It feels as if Morning Bell is playing behind aquarium glass with sharks singing harmonies and sunfish tossing tightly rolled joints on the stage. Imagine Roger Waters performing The Little Mermaid soundtrack. Yes, I’m serious. In fact, I would not be surprised if Through the Belly synced nicely to The Little Mermaid. I’m sure every stoner reading this will try.
The album is diverse. A poppy burst like the opening track “The Speed of God” sits beside more cerebral tracks like “The Octopus Walks Across the Coral” and “Waiting on Sleep”. In addition, we are treated to occasional rocky riffs and instrumentals, which make Through the Belly of the Ocean unique and enjoying experience. The real gem of the album is an epic track titled “Faster than Eagles, Stronger than Lions”, a truly rocking song with a playful bass line and hard riffs that contrast to the rest of the album’s more relaxed approach. “Faster than Eagles, Stronger than Lions” sticks out, whether that’s good or bad isn’t quite clear. What is clear however is the attention to detail in each track. The album is full of discovery; each track is peppered with little bubbly effects that enhance the Caribbean/Lets just all sit down and drink on the beach feeling.
Over all, it’s eclectic and progressive and leaves the listener feeling intrigued. Through the Belly of the Sea is a testament to Morning Bell’s future as kings of indy-progressive-pop-rock. I highly recommend everybody pick up this album and take a day trip to the aquarium. It will be a surreal experience. I promise.

I will be leaving... in 7 months time. I don't know when I will be returning only that I will be gone for quite some time.

Despite every nerve in my body telling me that this trip is the wrong thing to do, "it's irresponsible, it's selfish, it's at a bad time, it's stupid, it's dangerous. In 7 months I will be driving across the Ohio state line hopefully not to return until I am done.

A pilgrimage? That makes sense. Pilgrimages are journeys for the religious or spiritual to a holy place in hopes of achieving some sort of enlightenment. Some sort of... inner peace. Some sort of... bigger purpose.

I know my limitations or, at least, I think I do. Maybe this adventure will help me to become closer to who I really am. Or maybe it will kill me. Whatever the case may be. Death is not the ultimate goal.

I will be taking my laptop, guitar, books, plenty of water, money, credit cards, clothes, 2 person tent, paper, pens, my drum and anything else that seems important at the time. There is room for two in my car.

Ideas?

Generation Gap

I've been reading a book called Generation Me. Great book, very interesting. Basically, it discusses, in detail, what makes the generation born 1980-2005 unique. More or less... we suck at life. But anyways, very informative, great facts, super statistics and all in all a very groovy read.

Here is a poem I've just started. It has a lot of revision to go but the basic idea is there...

1. World wars great depressions leave young minds
with big impressions shaping heart times
glued together with silly putty
held together with erector-sets

2. Magnetized to television sets
turn your radio dial to haunted

3. Little boys dreamed as they seemed frightened
war time conquerers and heros screamed
nothing is how it seems halloween
nothing is how it seems halloween
terrible wails and ghosts cry save me

4. They don't know where to go does it snow
in eyes of widowed mother's wide eyes
sly bastard children sing nursery
rhymes whispered into fairy filled ears

They stood erected in sun set skies
Blazon silhouettes tall testaments