School has begun

Summer is over. Today, I went back to my wonderful high school for the first day of junior year. Hooray.

Friendster

In this day and age, Facebook seems to be the only real social networking site, as Myspace and Friendster died a long time ago, and Google+ is far from the mainstream. However, I decided to go to Myspace and Friendster just to see what they were like. Myspace is just a cluttered bunch of nonsense, but Friendster had something interesting.

Seems generic, doesn't it? One thing sticks out, though.

Unlike Myspace, it seems that Friendster not only fell to Facebook, it embraced it. 

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants

This album is said to be Oasis's worst album. After hearing Heathen Chemistry, I knew that it had to be bad to beat that disappointment. But that album has nothing to compare. This album is without a doubt the worst Oasis album, and it's honestly hard to listen to at times.
This album was being recorded when the band lost two founding members, "Bonehead" and "Guigsy." As a result, Oasis rerecorded the album as a three-piece, and added electronic elements to the music. The album sounds entirely different from their earlier work, and almost comes off as an attempt for the band to completely expand. This album utterly fails in that regard.
The result of this turbulence is a mediocre to awful album that stands out as the worst Oasis album. The fault here comes from both bad songwriting and Be Here Now-esque indulgences. The entire album is filled with experiments that go nowhere and overly simplistic songs. It has a disconnect to it, and yet it seems to flow because every song is similar in some regards. But the dichotomy of this album is unintentional, and comes off as faulty. Albums that have working dichotomy can intrigue the listener, like Wilco's Summerteeth. But this album merely bores or annoys the listener.
Unless you are a committed Oasis fan, you will not enjoy most of this album. And even if you are a committed Oasis fan, some of these songs will test your patience.

1. F**king in the Bushes - 7/10 A strange opener. It's an instrumental that features a loud blaring riff, chaotic drums, and screaming background voices saying "kids are running around f**king in the bushes!" The song gets too repetitive, which is where I dock the points, but it does have a lot going for it.
2. Go Let it Out - 10/10 A very Beatle-esque song and the best on the album. This song sounds like a basic softer Oasis song that was embellished with electronic sound, and it works incredibly well. The song has a hypnotizing sound to it, being somewhat repetitive, but it doesn't go to any extreme.
3. Who Feels Love - 4/10 A lousy Indian style song. It's got lousy lyrics and an incredibly repetitive sound. The song has been so over-embellished that it just sounds clunky. The best part is a looping melody that acts as the bridge. It might have been sampled at the start of Bender's Game.
4. Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is - 1/10 A loud, steamy pile of garbage. Featuring a heavy distorted sound effect and punk-esque vocals, it's repetitive and goes on and on, never getting out of the same few lines.
5. Little James 1/10 Crap. A big fat pile of crap. This is the vocalist Liam Gallagher's first song that makes it on an Oasis album, and it's just bad. Repetitive, simplistic, and hard to listen to, it's the worst song on the album, and according to a majority of fans, the worst in the entire Oasis catalogue.
6. Gas Panic 7/10 One of the more renowned tracks on the album, this song has a lot going for it. Featuring a repetitive series of beats, an eerie synthesizer, and Liam's haunting vocals, this song is a standout on the album. But there's two things that undermine it. One is the length. Clocking in at six minutes, it drags on. And that ties into the other problem. It's too repetitive. If it was whittled down a bit, this would be the best song on the album.
7. Where Did It All Go Wrong 7/10 A classic sounding Oasis song that gets put through the same electronic filter. Like Gas Panic, there's a lot going for it, but it gets cut off at the knees, this time due to overproduction.
8. Sunday Morning Call 9/10 A close runner-up for best song on the album. This song, like Gas Panic, is crippled by length, but unlike Gas Panic, this song survives and thrives. Built around Noel's gentler vocals and an electronic melody, this song is catchy and enjoyable, even at its 5 minute length and lack of dynamic qualities.
9. I Can See a Liar 2/10 Ever listen to one of AC/DC's early albums and completely forget about a few songs? This song is an homage to those. It's got an Angus Young riff and goes absolutely nowhere, and at its end the listener didn't get anything out of it. Forgettable nonsense.
10. Roll it Over 4/10 A long, slow, repetitive closer. It's got power to it, but unlike Champagne Supernova or Gas Panic, there's no direction. The song is aimless, meandering along, never finding its voice, and finally it peters out. If this song had a better melody and direction, it would be a shining star in the Oasis catalogue. As is, it's barely passable.

The Worst Movie I've Ever Seen

Well, it ranks up there.

The Adventures of the American Rabbit

My review:

This movie is so bad, I registered at Imdb to review it. "The Adventures of the American Rabbit" is a film so devoid of any sort of human qualities, it is impossible to conclude that it was made by our species. The film contains no intelligence whatsoever. There is not a shred of anything that resembles an actual movie in this film. It's unspeakably awful.

 The film starts with Rob the rabbit being raised in some weird European place, even though he's the American rabbit. These first few scenes play like something like I wrote when I was ten, having very little exposition, awkward and jarring pacing, and making almost no sense. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, Rob turns into the American Rabbit during a picnic. An old rabbit shows up and tells him that he is part of a "legacy" and then Rob walks away and does something to go to San Francisco, where he meets these Jackals who shout nonsense and ride motorcycles.

 This first act of the film made me want to turn it off immediately. But I kept watching. And it just got stupider and stupider. Like when the villain kidnaps a chocolate making moose and claims that he now controls all chocolate. Or how Rob the Rabbit stops the water at Niagara Falls with lightening, shutting off the power grid for the entire country. The whole thing was just awful. 

While the plot was nonsensical, the dialogue was something else. It made no sense what so ever. Not one shred of sense. And yes, the film was made in Japan, but it was written by Americans, which nulls that excuse. In addition to the nonsense that the characters said, there was the fact that the voice actors were just bad. They spoke in monotonous dull voices that sapped away any sense of emotion. 

The only possible scenario I can imagine where one would pull enjoyment from this film is from a purely nostalgic perspective. Other than that, there is not one shred of entertainment to be found.

ACS Repost: White Light/White Heat

Whenever I publish an album review for ACS, I'll post it here.

White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground

7.5/10

An unfortunately large number of people disregard the Velvet Underground as an avant-garde bunch of nonsense-makers, like Captain Beefheart and others from the 60s avant-garde movement. The main reason for this assumption is their second album, White Light/White Heat.

This album is unbelievably loud, noisy, and nonsensical. It borders on the edge of musical acceptability. Featuring wild experiments, endless improvisation, long jams, nonsensical instrumentation, and innuendo-layden lyrics, this album is a great look at the strange, twisted, fucked up landscape of the 60s avant-garde underground.

This album breaks dozens of musical rules. The opener descends into chaos. The second song has a story in it, which is incredibly disturbing. Another tells a sick story of a botched operation. And another acts as a homage to the early 1900s classical music with an atonal guitar solo that drowns everything out. But the closer is the strangest. 17 minutes of endless improvisation, disobeying the goals of jazz artists, who aimed for harmony, by creating a chaotic cacophony of noise.

White Light/White Heat is not impossible to listen to, however, if one keeps an open ear. The mainstream listener will listen to one second of much of this album and throw it out, but if one enjoys the strange and nonsensical, this album is for you. This is why the album has such a legacy. The insane rule-breaking styles have influenced dozens of artists in the years since its release, who are intrigued by the strange and somewhat hypnotizing sounds of White Light/White Heat.

1. White Light/White Heat - 9/10  An upbeat opener that sounds like an avant-garde version of their earlier song "I'm Waiting for the Man." This song is a loud piano-base romp that describes the effects of amphetamines that were popular in the underground at that time. It ends after a descent into chaos. 
2. The Gift - 7/10  This song is really two different things entirely, spit into the different ears. One ear hears John Cale, the violist, telling a story written by Lou Reed. The other hears a loud feedback-saturated jam that's less than spectacular. The story is where all the attention is. It describes Waldo Jeffers, a man from Pennsylvania who pines for his lover Marcia in Wisconsin, and, unable to go there in a conventional way, decides to mail himself there. But he seals his packaging too tight and Marcia, unable to open it without a sharp pike, sends the pike into Waldo's skull.
3. Lady Godiva's Operation - 5/10 An incredibly fucked up song. Like The Gift, this song has two distinct parts, but they come as stages in the song. The first stage describes a promiscuous woman named Lady Goldiva. The second stage describes a back-alley operation that fails. It's incredibly disturbing and messed up, great for any fan of the twisted and macabre.
4. Here She Comes Now - 8/10 The calmest and most direct song on the album. A quiet 60s-style song, it's short and is entirely innuendo, punctuated by Reed's moans.
5. I Heard Her Call My Name - 3/10  Out of every song on this album, not one is anywhere near as grating as this one. It starts with feedback exploding into the listeners ears and Reed screaming "Wait a minute!" Reed then shouts out a series of nonsensical yells that are so distorted it's hard to decipher them. The track's feature is an atonal guitar solo that's almost exclusively feedback. Every now and then the song descends to the brink of madness before returning over the edge. The feedback finally ends it.
6. Sister Ray - 7/10 This song is unbelievable. Based around a simple three chord pattern and repetitive melody, the song is 17 minutes of endless improvisation that ranges from coordinated noise to sheer chaos. The track features three distinct elements. One is an organ that fills in gaps and is the most melodic. Second is an electric guitar that's played with chords and cadences half the time, and is just atonal nonsense the other half. The third element is Lou Reed singing a tale of debauchery, warning that "You'll stain the carpet" and repeating that "She's too busy sucking on my ding dong" and that "It's just like Sister Ray says." The song changes from near harmony at its start to chaos several times. The three main elements battle for supremacy, with Marie Tucker drumming quietly off in the corner. The song finally concludes with a crescendo and a sudden yell from the guitar. 

Layers

Going about your average day, it's easy to see why we often fall for the misconception that people are one-sided or simplistic. You go to work and see all the commuters as mindless sheep. Or you get to know someone to the point at which you claim that there is no good in them at all. Or you know someone who is so kind to you that you can't think of them doing any wrong.
Here is the big shocker. People are complicated. Each and every one of us has a deep and complex mind with multiple layers to our personality. No matter how one-sided someone may appear, they will always have different layers to them. And no matter how mindless the multitudes appear, each one of them is deep and complex.
I have known this for a while, but I still find myself declaring that a person has no good in them, or that a person cannot do any wrong, or that a person is too simple/stupid to have any depth to them. But this is never true. No matter how sure you are, you will always be wrong.
But what are layers? One one level, they are personalities for specific circumstances. I put on one layer of awkward introverted shyness for one social event, then change it to loud foolishness for another.  And everyone really has two general layers for this: one public and one private.
On another level, they are different personalities all together. One side of me wants to stay introverted and shy, but another part of me want social contact. As a result, I end up following both. One of my more intelligent friends has an entire congress of personalities that he controls, and it's plain to see that in his behavior.
On a third level, they are good and evil. Oftentimes the question is asked: Are people inherently good or bad? Well, the answer is that everyone is inherently both. Sometimes someone can appear to be a good person, but they have a bad side to them. And conversely, someone who you find to be despicable is actually a decent person on some level. There are a few of us who are farther out on the spectrum in either direction, but most of us lie in the middle, where we all have positive motives and all indulge in negative behavior. And our actions are used to judge us unfairly, as an act of compassion raises a reputation while an act of violence ruins it.
But something that is interesting about all of this is that, as we are all human, we all have similar amounts of depth to us. Some of us will waste this depth, others will fulfill its potential. In many ways, this is a better gauge for intelligence than just knowledge. If one could open the psyche of my friend with the congress of personalities and then open the mind of one unintelligent stoner that I know and map out their minds, they would be about the same size. The more intelligent person would be the one who puts these layers to good use.
But the point of this entire essay is just this: Don't just use a short blurb to describe someone.  No one word, sentence, or paragraph can be used to define a person, for nobody can be described in less than a novel. So the next time that you look at the world as a bunch of simplistic people with one dimension to their lives, just remember that our psyches, though varied, are all about the same size, and that the "mindless" commuter you see passing by is about as deep as you.

Remembering My Old Class

Yesterday I returned to the my high school, San Marin, to watch the sunrise. The photo 

I got was less than spectacular.

But that wasn't the highlight of this walk. The highlight was walking past my old computer apps class. Now, previously I mentioned that I was in this lousy class that introduced me to blogger. Well, I'm going to go in detail about it for a bit.

In this class, everyone sat around "working" on assignments. The class was filled with slackers who annoyed the hell out of everyone, and nobody took it seriously. But the teacher was something else. Mr. Farley, the wonderful teacher of this glorious class, could not teach at all. His method was just to lecture about what the application would do in the workplace, and then not bother explaining how it worked. In addition to this, when he decided to use discipline against the slackers, he ended up starting daily lectures about taking off hats. I couldn't take him seriously, and I hated that class, as these posts on my old blog indicate:

Final Reflection

Excel

Reflection 3

But I never got mad enough to barge out of the class. Even when one student sprayed silly string in my face, or Mr. Farley refused to help me while he was lecturing about chicken sandwiches, or when another student threw a can of soda at me, I held my tongue. But after walking by it today, I burst into a rant that I continued all the way home. And it reminded me how much I hated that class.

But it's over. That's the one good thing about it. It's all over.

Sunrises

For the past few months, I have had an obsession with sunrises. I personally find them to be the most beautiful part of the day, even better than sunsets. It's because with a sunset, you see the sun go down and then its over. With a sunrise, the sun rises and until about 8, depending on the weather, it stays beautiful.
But the biggest reason I have is that sunrises are so hard to reach. To see a sunset takes no effort at all. But to see a sunrise means that you have to readjust your sleep cycle to earlier in the morning, and unless you have a job that starts early, it's hard to do that. It's also hard to stay up to watch the sunrise, because it takes so very long and insomnia isn't exactly reliable. Plus, it makes you groggy during the day.
This is what I find so appealing about sunrises. For me, the hours I can be awake are usually from 7 AM to 4AM if I'm going all day and night. There's that one little window of time that I have a hard time reaching that is the most beautiful part of the day.
Hopefully I'll be able to readjust my sleep cycle to watch them for the rest of the month. But until I know if I succeeded at that, I'll just post this shot from this morning as motivation.

It's August!

Fuck!

Why is it already August? That leaves me with three weeks left of precious summer! Time is slipping away!

Whatever. It sucks. Nothing I can do.