Entries from July 2007 ↓

Really neat online poster gallery that Sumo sent me. I wish you could zoom in on each poster.

John from Cincinnati is this new show on HBO that I initially resisted. I started watching it because A. I’m home most Sunday nights and B. my parents watch anything on HBO.

Mitch Yost is an aging surf legend, forced to retire after a knee injury, who now runs a surf shop in Imperial Beach and broods over his failure. His son, Butchie, was also a huge star in the family business — but is now a bitter heroin addict, living in a run-down hotel. Butchie’s surfing prodigy son, Shaun, lives with Mitch and his wife, Cissy.
Into the lives of this dysfunctional family comes John Monad, a mysterious young man with a habit of repeating what other people say. Immediately, strange things start happening — a dead parrot comes back to life, Butchie doesn’t suffer withdrawal symptoms, and Mitch starts to spontaneously levitate.
Slowly, other people around the Yosts are drawn into the strange happenings — a sleazy surfing promoter, a starstruck young filmmaker, an eccentric lottery winner, a Vietnam vet.
The new series, created by Deadwood producer David Milch and surf noir novelist Kem Nunn, examines the connections that tie people together, and shows what happens to damaged people when a force of healing comes into their lives.

The interest in this show for me (aside from the good music and filming) is speculating about who/what John Monad is or represents. Initially it seemed like he was either: retarded, psychic, god, or the devil. He doesn’t eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom. So that rules out retarded or psychic. Currently I’m leaning towards Jesus or John the Baptist.

(from Greek monas “unit”), an elementary individual substance that reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived. The term was first used by the Pythagoreans as the name of the beginning number of a series, from which all following numbers derived. Giordano Bruno in De monade, numero et figura liber (1591; “On the Monad, Number, and Figure”) described three fundamental types: God, souls, and atoms. The idea of monads was popularized by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Monadologia (1714). In Leibniz’s system of metaphysics, monads are basic substances that make up the universe but lack spatial extension and hence are immaterial. Each monad is a unique, indestructible, dynamic, soullike entity whose properties are a function of its perceptions and appetites. Monads have no true causal relation with other monads, but all are perfectly synchronized with each other by God in a preestablished harmony. The objects of the material world are simply appearances of collections of monads.

Cincinati, the city, was named after a society of sorts that took its name from Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus of Ancient Rome, who left his farm to accept a term as Roman Consul and then served as Magister Populi for a short time, thereby assuming near-dictatorial control of Rome to meet a war emergency. When the battle was won, he returned power to the Senate and went back to plowing his fields. The Society’s motto reflects that ethic of selfless service: Omnia relinquit servare rempublicam - He relinquished everything to serve the Republic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrWZlh7DnBE[/youtube]

Yes, I know I shouldn’t think about TV this much.

My haul.

So I got a sewing machine for my birthday and am trying to teach myself to sew. I don’t know anyone I’m willing to ask for help. I think this is going to be very frustrating for me, but a goal is a damn goal.

That said, currently I can only sew a pillow cover … but patterns were on sale for $1.99!

Letters to my boss from my coworker John.

And also..

This card came in the mail today with a $150 gift card and no information. I went to the website and I think it means I won the quarterly bronze prize.

This past Wednesday Anna-Claire took me to see Gogol Bordello at the 9:30 Club for our birthdays. They played for 2 hours and it was the most energetic event I’ve ever seen. This put me into a Eugene Hutz google frenzy which led to the Pied Piper of Hutzovina and “Music on the Bones”:

At that time, you could only buy Soviet music on vinyl. But the bootleggers had figured out a way to make contraband records by getting old x-ray plates, which were then made of vinyl, through connections at various hospitals. Then they’d get hold of the equipment to cut the record grooves into the x-rays.