Capital is caring less.

Love, please understand, my first memory of death in the family was a party.

A short list of Canadian bands that should've been in the Winter Olympics opening ceremony

 Instead of Flaming Lips*, we got flaming penises

Sure - the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games opening ceremony was impressive in terms of logistics and scale (what Olympics ceremony isn't?), but why did "Inspire the World" have to translate into "Bore me to (Ice-cube) Tears?" Why is a former new-waver, Ignatius Jones, giving us Nelly Furtado and Bryan Adams?

What the ceremony did inspire me to do was compile a short list of Canadian bands (thanks to Wikipedia) that I would liked to have seen instead:

• Black Mountain
• Broken Social Scene
• Chromeo
• Crystle Castles
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor <- perhaps enough Winter Olympics dough would bring them out of hiatus...?
• Junior Boys
• King Khan (with whatever crew he chooses)
• MSTRKRFT
• The New Pornographers
• Skinny Puppy (can you imagine?!)
• Any of the Unicorns spin-off bands

* - I know the Flaming Lips aren't from Canada - Oklahoma has finally officially recognized them as their own - but the giant bear seemed like something right out of their concert playbook.

Black Mountain - "Wucan"

"Awesome-Blage '09" closing reception at Artjail, this Fri., Jan. 8th, from 7-10PM

The show I'm in, "Awesome-Blage '09" is having a closing reception this Friday, Jan. 8th, from 7-10PM.  With live performances by Big Game and Open Ocean.  At Artjail, 50 Eldridge St., 6th Fl., NY, NY 10002.

Something I heard on the radio that resonated with me

On his Oct. 13 show, Brian Lehrer asks Deepak Chopra the naturally skeptical question about how the pursuit of enlightenment isn't just solipsistic "navel-gazing," to which Chopra responds:

"Because you see, solipsism is self-centeredness, more or less. Whereas meditation takes you beyond the separate self; it takes you to a trans-personal domain. And ultimately, enlightenment is a state where you don't actually believe in your personal identity at all, because you realize that your personal identity is a transient, impermanent, ephemeral manifestation of a more universal consciousness, and that's the only thing that it is. So it's the antithesis of solipsism." (Deepak Chopra, WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, 13 Oct. 2009)

The form of Chopra's answer has undeniably achieved a level of cliché familarity. But I nonetheless agree with him, and think that recognizing this difference is probably harder than most people would expect, or is a distinction that some people - despite their entire lives - never even consider.

Sharing is caring.

Nonprofit newspapers = way of the future

from Newsweek:

If Geffen were successful in landing The New York Times, said one of the confidantes, he'd convert it into a nonprofit institution. He would regard the newspaper, perhaps the world's most influential journalistic enterprise, as a national treasure meriting preservation into perpetuity. His model would be the ownership structure of Florida's St. Petersburg Times, which is controlled by a nonprofit educational institution, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "David would hope the newspaper makes a profit," said the confidante. "But he believes that operating without the ultimate responsibility of paying dividends or necessarily having to be profitable is the best way to run an institution like The New York Times."

The article ends with the factoid that the aforementioned St. Petersburg Times has won two Pulitzers - surpassed only by the NY Times' five.