Manufacturing Consent: A Movie about Noam Chomsky

If you have a couple hours to sit down and watch an incredible documentary, make sure to watch this one. The first time I heard about Noam Chomsky was in a NOFX song. I wish I would have looked him up a tad bit sooner.

I'm too tried to give a description so heres one from Wikipedia!:

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) is a multi award-winning documentary film that explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, a linguist, intellectual, and political activist. Created by two Canadian independent filmmakers, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, it expands on the ideas of Chomsky's earlier book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which he co-wrote with Edward S. Herman(Wikipedia)

Please just watch the first 10 minutes. This documentary will change the way you watch media. Not porn though, you'll probably still watch that the same way.


Here's that NOFX song, you punx:

The Soothsayer Satire: Sam Schachter Studies? by Devin Doyle

Devin wrote this great piece that was featured in the The Purchase Indy
I think it's good to laugh at yourself sometimes or most of the time or for me, all the time.

By Devin Doyle

According to the Purchase College Registrar, major events coordinator and campus personality, Sam Schachter, is going to become a major here at Purchase, starting in the fall of 2010. Students will get the opportunity to earn a four-year undergraduate degree in the study of the young man’s biography, his opinions on everything from music to sports, and his future ambitions in life.
Many prospective Purchase students are relieved that a college is finally offering the major they have been looking for. High school student, David Deytraype, from Forest Hills, NY, is hoping to study that major next year as a freshman. “I have been a huge fan of Schachter’s since I was twelve years old,” says Deytraype. “I really hope to work for Schachter in some way after college. I even grew a beard like his!” Nebraska high school student, Alan Spangreen, won a $25,000 scholarship to Purchase after writing an essay entitled, “Schachter Schock,” which argued that Culture Shock should be renamed after the event’s sole organizer. “I’m honored that the scholarship board allows me to come to Purchase to pursue my dream,” Spangreen tells The Independent. “My financial situation wouldn’t have allowed it otherwise.”
Many undecided Purchase students have now found their niche in this new major. Ethan Kahn, sophomore undecided, thought of majoring in Gender Studies, but instead has decided to major in Sam Schachter. “You know, there’s really nothing you can do with a Gender Studies degree, but the world is your oyster if you have a degree in Sam Schachter,” Kahn says.
A student majoring in Sam Schachter will be offered a highly comprehensive curriculum including such classes as:

• “Introduction to Sam Schachter” (3 credits) An introduction course, which spends two semesters detailing the basic history of Schacter’s twenty plus year life, along with some of his core values.
• “Applied Theories of Schachter” (2 credits) Studies all the decisions Schachter has made at Purchase as a coordinator and organizer and compares them to major events coordinators in 20th century world history.
• “Queer Schachter” (3 credits) Taught by the renowned Gender Studies professor Dr. Laura Henlock, this course re-contextualizes Schachter from gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender perspectives
• “LoveSchack Practicum” (4 credits) A senior-only class in which students develop theses of their own based on opinions found in Schachter’s blog.

The Registar is also considering offering a minor called “Steve Sabel” in which students will juxtapose the careers of Sabel and multiple Presidential nominee Bob Dole

I thought that was fucking hillarious, what did you think?

I Drink For A Reason excerpt

I started reading David Cross's book I Drink For A Reason, after I found it at an Urban Outfitters in Boston.

This is an excerpt from the book ( the audio book)



Part 1


Part 2



I highly suggest this book for anyone who enjoys essays on Jim Belushi, thoughts while pooing, and the inside conversations during marketing meetings at FOX network.

Support Your Local Library

Being back home in suburban New Jersey, living with your father and his newly aquired girlfriend provides for great times. However, when I'm not jumping up and down with excitement, I visit the library. Last week I got all of these amazing pieces of media.

Movies:
The Color Of Money
Broken Flowers
Helvetica


Book:

Franny and Zooey


Most likely your library isn't as hip and cool as mine, but If i were you I would still attempt a visit. This post is not just about self-examination of how cool I might be for visiting the library. While doing some research on Franny and Zooey, I came across this pretty impressive thing...

GET LECTURED BY A YALE PROFESSOR!!!



Who needs $100,000 for a Yale education anymore. Now you only need a stable internet connection.


Apparently J.D didn't enjoy doing interviews. So here's one with a classmate of his, talking about Salinger. I can only wonder what my classmates would say about me.



The French always have to ruin things.




Keep reading and tip your librarian.
t.l.s

"In May"- Brendan Taylor

In May

A still breeze
Strains echo
Under a flower-tree.
Door shuts
Light jarringly
Flickers out…
Balloon whispers
Clear quiet
Silver string dangles
Carvings etch the bark
From a wet year before
Do you see the marks?

A father touches his daughter’s neck
Fingers her necklace
A gang of youths shout rape aloud
To their backs
As a joke--
Daughter grows up.

Columns silhouette
Salt with unknowns
A hot dog roasts between the bars
Last meal, last rights voiced
Footsteps
Quietude
Vomiting.

And here you stir,
Here you hear the bell sighing
Moaning low—reaching those who know it as
A piece of release
Where hurt isn’t anger
And anger isn’t a prize to stimulate…

Here, consciousness floats kinda slow
Light hits newness on
Twenty three years
As a phase.
The phrase of the riddle ringing out
Across the slipstream
Especially the homespun ones
Where you get a bite or give someone a buzz
Or lecture on the art of grandma’s funeral.
Communication is the key to
Indecisiveness…
A
Learning process
How ironic
Kempt soft
Kept muted
Kept lost
Until yawning abates
A soup so jaded…

A ringleader gambles this contradiction
Five times a month
Looking in a lion’s mouth
Heartstrings jangle a keychain
His sweetheart bought him on island time.

Nervousness stains
Standing over others
As a tall pile
Small as hell
Senseless against this felt tipped angelic-ness
Silk-screening fear,
Silencing quotas,
Numbers are just
Imagined hurtles…

Marksmen and girlfriends
And self-anchoring loses to nibbled on ears
Lost and found-ness
Notices not what sifts diligently—
Al and Heather and basement dwellers
That cover-up when the sun rays.

Favoritism yields relief—
For the still
Grass-blades bring
When played on a trumpet
In a note as a piece.

Ladies men compose wrong notes
And girls buy into assholishness
Posing in their skirt-costumes
Making wagers
Painting over sexual favors…

Transient dust bites pop music.
Walking along an illusion
Ending up—
Ending up—
Quite corrupt
With philosopher’s luck.

But was this ever not here?
Was this ever an unwavering melting pot
Of tarry diction,
Ready to rot?

In May, they might know.
In May they’ll chat and reach conclusion.
Determine allusions
Losing self to the intimidating nature of red benevolence.
Ricochets back into sight
Back into work
A callous plight
Kept trite
As a sifting game.
Sifting oh so uniformly….

In May, relationships begin and end.
Stifle
Coexist
Become what’s missing
Each face wearing
And then,
There’s dreaming
(Damning)
Dreaming
Where cameras aren’t watchmen---
And pay-per-view isn’t fornicating
All this noise that prevents loudness from breathing…

So in May--
I remain quiet
As still as night-grass
With Al and Heather
(The basement dwellers)
With ringleaders and convicts
Island key-chains, drunken bee-stings,
Misused daughters and recycled grandma’s
And the ten thousand playboy’s named Ben
That cliché themselves from day one
Through their indispensable numbers--
Numbers
Are just imagined hurtles…
And still, how much of growing
Is counting?

How much of growing is counting?
How much of growing is counting?

"Pitchfork"- anonymous

I found this on a bulletin board at Purchase College. No name attached.




Keep believing.

7 Days

7 Days
by Brendan Taylor



Memories ash
Paler now than the
Mountain misunderstood
In an appetite for your hunger.
Undertaking destruction, legalizing thunder.
In the belly of a sigh squalling,
In broken off fingers, chewed-up paranoia,
Sawed-off false claims align.
The tune hums numbness through anger…

Slammed-in martyrdom scars
Like the gnarled tree a pastry chef cannot shape.
A spot where no birds will flock, no animals will take pity on.
Where dust shovels a poison headache
Aimlessly unfolding a
Regrettable skin cold.
Inside, blood-tears cloud as atriums empty, breath sunders/
Crumbling toes asphyxiate
A cigar dries out the humidor,
Hangover sods the folklore,
And humor plays the misplaced one
Like never before, he swims.

Winds connect
Wilted branches suddenly
Correcting trances.
Asymmetrical leaf pattern dances
Absent hand-holds
Fleeing hip-touches
Forecast future let-downs,
He’s drowning.

A son will separate the womb
A son will plague worlds within.
As a sun will capsize this day,
A son will depart you all too soon.


A daughter reaches for imaginary air,
A table will clutch her underneath,
Where windows rob shrugging views.
Hands wrap-ankles
And prayers sigh like a whore.
A youth void of Dad, alone
Just as never before.

North of Somewhere
Calm growls/ calm grows
In alleviation’s tones.
Solemn--he stares at me, unrequitedly.
Mixtures of self-perseveration in a pit of angst.
Monsters canonize, the séance is breached.

Inside piles of muddy violence,
Intuition grows naturedly, secondly.
Oh the guilt…will can bring.
Caught in between these river banks
An ironed out slave,
An ancient rut proclaims/ defames
Words of the unwritten
For under-written ones.

Dissenting eyes rip,
Outward-sockets fall
Paradise looms
Inward tears a cornea,
Down falls the crown.

And so it was written…
Alien to the ground
Sleeping through clock’s pain,
A wreath of sadness,
The cereal box’s dismay
At morning loudness,
Only a murderess can bring to a small town.
Now, I write him away…



7 days fuel the week out
7 days they said it was all made
Without a sound.
7 days number in plain
Contrast.
7 days Apollo reverses an island of wills
The mediocre moon wails
Pain insidenial…shrill.




7 days without context, sleeping bag nor hair tie.
No comfort through avoidance.
Aphrodite and Eros,
Swimming through him to stardom, alone.

7 days, “I don’t think so….”
In the eighth, he lasts.

Soon Brendan will learn the ways of the internet and be able to be contacted, until then leave a comment.

Brendan's Note

Kurdt
by Brendan Taylor

Dying prematurely is the most striking part to him to you. That and his voice I suppose; his ephemeral, compelling voice. Suffocating is all you tend to do and perhaps he chose to bring the pillow in a bit closer. Some don’t want the last words or all-wrong floral arrangements compromising their final bubble-wrapped moments. Some dictate their last breath, if this is even the case, but it’s not the point.
Kurt Cobain never trailed off into the beating unconsciousness brings with it. He never wanted to relive days of youth or grandeur. He was “married, buried,” had a daughter that needed changing, a house that needed chipping and painting, music that needed retooling and promoting, and perhaps these were more chains to his persona than anything else. Really, he never grew up.
Some choose to tell their own stories for you to be left guessing at them as a detective/victim to their sheer fame, searching the remaining pieces of a lousy crime scene. Like James Dean or Robert Johnson, some become folklore unto themselves. You never see where exactly the surge of their pathway is leading, if to anywhere. This turns into another form of rationalizing a boring existence in hoping for the other side of consciousness. We lean often for some kind of energy.
Cobain was the energy he so sang of. This is also why he is not here anymore. Perceiving the worst forms of one’s reality is part of battling one’s self; some choose to dictate the fight and others keep on ignoring, keep on drowning. As screwed up and torrentially misguided as this will sound, it was the art of never allowing youthful naiveté or devotion to music be taken from him, that original notion of never straying into reunion tours or sad songs that try to recapture the light of what was. He never talked about which route will be more efficient to pick his daughter up from school. He never had his hair fall out, never started playing golf or shaming the Bush administration. Cobain never lamented in someone else’s pride or anxiety concerning his creations. By giving up, he never quite gave in.
Perhaps he should have stopped playing is all, but how can one ever stop when all they are attempting to do is start over? It’s as if you get high on art, then in the same swift backward motion: kill it forcefully. Is that victimizing your so-called idols, is it martyrdom? Or is it selfishness getting in the way, always expecting what you’re tritely familiar with? If in fact selfishness leads to suicide, then suicide derives from a self-driven world that manipulates, conjures and falsifies an individual’s very being.
Marlon Brando said, “There are no artists anymore.” He cited the modern forms of celebrity, vanity and wealth as the downfalls to the actual process of creation. Surely he forgets art is not just the scene he was involved in. But perhaps the suffocation is an art unto itself. Art is meant to resist, someone, something. Kurt resisted everything. To quote another heavy namesake, Bob Dylan remarked, “All my songs are protest songs,” when he was faced with animosity toward his new “sound” away from acoustic, topical songs.
Kurt was a rare form, a moving protest, one in the substandard MTV culture which became a paradise for those “trying to be”… anything, those self-rated who parallel everyone else as a measure of and for themselves. They didn’t have the chance to rate him, they couldn’t touch him; they were all over, smothering him, he couldn’t bear to think what he had become.
Yes there are artists, Mr. Brando, not only Shakespeare and Picasso, who did it for the sake of it, but there are ones who do it because they have to be recognized in order to rest; there are ones who do it because they know they’re bound to be heard, have to be heard, need to be-- what grows inside is a world within a world.
Cobain was an exception in modern pop music, he wrote in the grossest forms of irony and sang in the rigorous truths of originality. The rest can be left for duplicators to carbon-copy or discuss over the mediocrity of their late-night smokes.
You end up bothering still with what was made because it’s been approved almost, ridiculously, by someone, by something. That’s also because there was something there--Cobain’s humdrumness was so similar, so customary to our own passiveness. His pain was foreseeable, not comprehendible. His path is one stuck, maimed; preserved in a time warp.
When I still listen to Nirvana, Kurt’s voice emanates a tone of sarcasm that cannot be denied in most instances. Yet it is a sarcasm of ironic wit plagued by monotony. He takes the perspective of an outsider with simplistic lyrics that have the ability to reach and be interpreted in variant ways, while communicating how easy the game looks; how pathetic it may all be viewed if you’re not a regular participant in situations.
The simplicity with which Cobain executes is his greatest strength; in his words, in his melodies, even in his voice, for simplicity brings rawness, which brings passion. Maybe he was passionately ambivalent; maybe he decided to go in the polar opposite direction from most of the people in his logging home-town out of desperation. For, Cobain was not courageous; he was courageous in voice, in spirit, he was humbled by his overtly narcissistic placement in the world. Kurt was irregularly sensitive to the transience of things and maybe as a child he became too attached to have to watch them die all over again. Perhaps like all great artists, his head wouldn’t leave him alone; his heart wouldn’t leave him alone. Krist Novoselic said once, “Kurt was a great artist, completely original. The best artists create their own voice, Kurt created his own world.”
Maybe we’re all just dramatists trying to save everything as its happening, trying to capture what’s written while it’s being read; maybe Kurt knew to end it before things got a little awry; maybe he was a stupid kid who should have stuck things out and realized that times smooth over. Maybe some are too honest they never learn how to die the way we want them to.
Well, whatever… nevermind.

The whore who took his poems...

Our world has seen many horrors in its existence. But none as terrible as the following three...

1. Zombies
2. Nazis
3. Charles Bukowski

Thankfully - just so we don't ever forget how scary everything is - we have Youtube.

Onto the clips...

The Moth

Recently I had the urge to become a great storyteller. That's probably because I finally I have some good stories to tell. That aside, I began to look for inspiration, clues, something that might help me understand. Because I just couldn't figure out what made some people great at telling stories and others (me) so bad at it. Then behold! An organization of storytellers. Enter: The Moth.

The Moth is an organization that was founded a few years ago in New York by a Georgian trying to recreate his childhood story telling enjoyment; summer nights on a porch with moths clinging to screens.

These stories are told by authors and regular people alike, and always in front a live audience. I've found these stories to be unbelievably entertaining, and the best part is, it's a podcast too!

You can check it out here.

For those out there who are around New York or LA, you can see one of these performances live. But beware, despite a total lack of advertising, the shows sell out very quickly and consistently.

Though I still don't think I'm a very good story-teller, I've definitely found a new source of entertainment and some inspiration as well.