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By La Ruocco La Ruoc & co.; (September 3, 2003) ISBN: 0974345407
La Ruocco's Xero is epistemological profanity at its cleverest. A chaotic but perfect world to explore. For the lover of art that makes you think and laugh, Xero is, as Robert Bork once said, an 'intellectual feast.'
Xero mixes free-associative, recursive, pun-filled, and at times startlingly clear prose on topics from religion to La Ruocco's ass. To itemize the topics, to give away too much detail, would be to ruin part of the fun, which is discovery. The book unfolds, the ideas link and fertilize each other.
Interspersed throughout is copious color photography, much of it including said ass and the rest of Laruocco's stunning beauty.
Collaborative portions include a conversation about intellectual property and pornography with John S. Hall, and documentation of a scheme with Michael Portnoy to replace Calvin Klein ads with their own ass-based versions.
Xero is less a book than a journey and a performance piece. But that's wrong. That's because we have preconceptions …
Well, Joe Millionaire is back, and so is my tracking chart.
This ahh-shucks wholesome-as-apple-pie cowboy (with the emphasis on boy) and I don't see much eye to eye as far as women or anything else. I don't know. He thinks cursing and being dominant makes a girl "like a guy". To me, the kind of girl who doesn't curse, have a little attitude, and carry on a smart conversation would be the non-starter. Well, he can go for the model-thin shy "tall drinks of water", and I'll be favoring the smart beautiful ones.
Joe Millionaire 2 tracking chart–through the finale
Well, Joe Millionaire is back, and so is my tracking chart.
This ahh-shucks wholesome-as-apple-pie cowboy (with the emphasis on boy) and I don't see much eye to eye as far as women or anything else. I don't know. He thinks cursing and being dominant makes a girl "like a guy". To me, the kind of girl who doesn't curse, have a little attitude, and carry on a smart conversation would be the non-starter. Well, he can go for the model-thin shy "tall drinks of water", and I'll be favoring the smart beautiful ones.
Finale: The first half hour was mostly recapping; mixed in were current moments of Cat and Linda talking to each other and each to the camera. Linda told Cat that she deserved to be here at …
(Orig. September 21, 2003; updated 10/28/03 to reflect Fox schedule changes and add a few notes and changes of opinion) (updated again 11/10 to reflect additional schedule changes and cancellations)
Last year's annual fall TV season preview ran 9,000+ words. It's about two-thirds that this time. (I've also dropped the endnotes. I thought they were fun, but it's hard to do them well on the web so they ended up just being an obstacle.) I'm focusing more on what I like, and not covering what I don't unless its badness is interesting. In fact I'm also going to watch fewer shows this year. There are two reasons for this. For one, I plan to be more selective in what I add and I've dropped quite a few. And for the other, though there are a number of shows that are possibilities this season, their strength is not as certain as last year. I'm not expecting more than a few of my favorites to survive.
(Update 11/11: I felt I needed to update this one last time because of another batch of changes. Once again, the troublemaker is Fox. I can't blame Fox for canceling the fun Skin, since the ratings were bad, but it's still a huge disappointment. I loved the series and wonder why it didn't do better. Perhaps the fact that the good guy was the pornographer who was concerned about the well-being of his actresses and was willing to give money to charity anonymously because it …
Trip hop is one of my favorite forms of music. At its best, a beautiful, maybe even ethereal, female voice floats over gritty electronic music, making one of the most perfect tensions in music.
While trip hop has pretty much faded away, in its heyday I was doing the music programming for the downtempo electronic station at digital radio company Clickradio, a station I had created. The mix was probably 50 percent trip hop, along with some ambient, acid jazz, exotica and doses of alt-folk, singer/songwriter and alternative hip hop. But this playlist is pure trip hop (well, by my standards.) It's a mix of 40 tracks that represent a cross-section of the best the trip hop genre had to offer -- drawing from the dub, DJ and soul styles. Several of the tracks admittedly lack the feature that is supposed to define the genre: a slowed-down sample of a hip hop beat. I've included them because the genre became so much more than that, and they fit the feel and the culture of the genre otherwise. Lamb's work, for example, is technically jungle, and the beats are speeded up, not slowed down, but they also feature jazzy female vocals and were popular with trip hop lovers. The order is for the mix, the tracks have been sequences to work well together. It's not a ranking of the songs. I've put links on the album names to their Amazon pages, for your convenience, and perhaps a few pennies in my …
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:8 God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 1 John 4:16
Some talk about God being the source of all love. Some talk about God's love for us, God's servants, God's creation. Others talk about God's love being a perfect unconditional love that is distinct from the petty earthly love we express between each other. But there's another interpretation: take the statement at face value. You know love? Well, guess what, that's God. It's not something God does; it's not separate from God; it is God. God is love. It's the other descriptions of God that are the metaphors, metaphors for the life force that strives for connection with others, that recognizes the primal reality of that connection, the life force that so often defies scientific understanding, the force that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, the collective unconscious. God is that which connects us to each other, and love is the expression of that connection. So: love is that of God in each of us. Love is the act of making contact with the interconnectedness of all beings.
"Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love." Why is this concept so hard to understand? Well, certainly for modern people, raised in a mystery-free zone, taught to believe only what is …
This is obviously my opinion, but it's from a whole lot of experience. I have a bias towards female singers and female sentiments, but there are a few men mixed in here. Take a look. I'm also not strict about the definition of singer/songwriter. I remember when I was in radio the music nerds would debate over whether Elton John was a singer/songwriter since he wrote the music but not the lyrics. I don't care. Here, Alison Krauss, who does write songs, is singing a cover, two singers who don't write are covering Sting, who is a singer/songwriter but I like these versions better. There was also a debate over whether a performer who used a group name rather than an individual name for their work could be called a singer/songwriter, since the name is a singer's name. Again, I could care less and include several bands who write amazing songs. So, you can buy the disks and duplicate the sequence, or you can learn about a few tracks you don't already know, or if you already have them all, you can try my sequence if you want, or you can just read my comments and learn a thing or two about the songs and artists. (The numbering is the track sequence of my mix, not a ranking of the songs. They're all awesome.)
I've always refused to play this game because, after all, I typically have a few dozen different artists in rotation in my playlist at any one time and love stuff in virtually every genre. Top 100 maybe, but Top 10? Impossible. But I've recently come to the conclusion that much of my resistance is a form of phony elitism, as in "My tastes are too complex to reduce them to such a list." I also know that I listen to some stuff because it's "interesting" without actually enjoying it that much. So to defy those tendencies in myself, I set about constructing my Favorite Albums Ever list,1 based on what I love and what I think is awesome, issues of intellectual merit and genre balance be damned. (Notice I didn't say "best" albums; I said "favorite". I will acknowledge at least that much post-modern insistence on the relativeness of taste.) In order to impose a little Sound Scan-style discipline on myself,2 I looked at my play counts in iTunes to see what I actually listen to the most. Note these are not in order; that would definitely be going too far. So, here then, are my fifteen favorite records ever (as I see it right now, which will probably have changed by the time you read this):
The Green movement in America in the 80s and early 90s was like the proverbial elephant and blind man. Depending on how you arrived at it and with whom you practiced it, you could have quite different perceptions of what it was about. Below is a list of the books I believe were most influential in the early stages of US Green activity, before it abandoned many of its non-dualistic ideas and solidfied into a Left-progressive group.
It's an eclectic collection, and I am definitely not saying I agree with everything said in all of them. Far from it. But if you were there, as I was, and you weren't strictly beholden to one ideology, then you might have read any or all of these in the process of understanding this new political groundswell. Note that this is not a definitive list of Third Wave/Green/Radical Middle/whatever reading, but a historic one to capture that moment. I am working on a shorter list of essential reading that also includes more recent stuff.
For some, the entry point was environmentalism. They may have been grassroots activists fighting nuclear power or developers or a toxic waste dump, or simply Sierra Club members who support those causes. Several early self-help thinkers expanded their scope to the whole society, seeing different structures and dysfunctions as social, not just personal, problems. Combined with the emerging New Age movement, this provided a spiritual entry point for the movement. Some feminists, especially those involved in spiritual work, …
In the 20th century the scientific method and worldview was forced onto every aspect of life with disastrous results. The belief that one can control something by gaining information about it is at the heart of much of this. The scientific method of observing controlled repeatable experiments and predicting future behavior from the results, while appropriate when dealing with consistent physical phenomena, can produce misleading and invalid results when applied to other things. (And of course, even with physical phenomena one's powers of observation are limited and are likely not revealing the full reality.)
The most blatant examples are in pseudo-sciences such as psychology and economics. Of course, plenty of good work does get done in these disciplines, but by labeling them sciences rather than arts, we give them an aura of being tapped into some fundamental natural truth, which protects them from appropriate scrutiny. (In fact, Freud pursued this deception quite deliberately. He knew that if his new school of philosophy was instead labeled a science it would be treated much more generously by society and would likely have far greater influence, and lobbied directly for this result.) It also confers on them the ideas that behavior can be predicted accurately and that anything unmeasurable or unobservable isn't real or relevant. It infuses them with an authority they don't deserve. They should be seen simply as philosophies, to be stacked up against other theories about why things are the way they are.
(This is a merging of the original two articles and an update that made up my look at the 2002 Fall TV Season (9/23/02, 10/28/02 and 3/21/03.) One, in September, came before most shows had aired. It was more a preview, sharing what I expected, good or bad, based on a show's premise and the people involved. The second, in October, offered reviews of those and the ones that started late. As I combine them and post this to the web in 2003, I'm adding some comments but not attempting to update them all. Many stand as reviews of the shows at that point. Hope you find some of this interesting or useful. Feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested, as long as you include attribution or, better, point them to the site. The footnotes/endnotes are nothing fancy. (A bit of explanation about why it's either. As originally conceived, this article had footnotes, but when I converted it to HTML, they became endnotes in that version.) When you click an endnote number it takes you to that endnote at the bottom of the document; then to get back to your place, you can click the endnote number down there or hit Back in your browser.)
There are shows that matter, shows that are thought-provoking and shows that are just fun. The list of shows that matter — shows that affect our culture, our politics and our views — is short. The West Wing …
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