34 hours of weekend

8am Saturday


Mandy's house in Harrisonburg; Cookout!




Blue Hole!




secret "Tower spot"


!!!!




Sunday morning, Arboretum.


Then to the winery...




Then, Happy Father's day!
6pm Sunday, home.

Art 1, boy.

Progress?

Hey Dave meet me at the swimming hole in Harrisonburg this weekend!

music review

“Rag and bone” is a new song on the new album from the White Stripes. Jack and Meg are in an old antique-like house (“it’s like a mansion- look at all this stuff”) where it is all seemingly up for grabs (“if you don’t want it- we’ll take it”). Near the end of the song Jack breaks into a free association ramble that makes no sense but is pretty fun to listen to-
“West side, Southwest side, middle east, rich house, dog house, out house,.old folks house, house for unwed mothers, halfway homes, catacombs, twilight zones, looking for technics tables to turn tables to gramma phones, So take a last lick of your ice cream cone; and lock up what you still want to own; but please be kind, and don't rewind...”

I immediately began trashing this album after my second or third listen. I was totally confused and shocked at how ridiculous some of the tracks were sounding to me. Now, as I write this, after about my fifth or sixth listen all the way through, I think it is growing on me (I’ve only had it for two days!) I can tell you right now, that the new White Stripes album is absolutely fucking fantastico! However, many of you reading this will probably disagree with me at first and will surely find it hard to listen to the first few times (if you even give it that many).
The White Stripes have definitely taken a turn in (yet another) new direction, and this has to be their most peculiar album so far. The album is rocky, bumpy and inconsistent (“Icky Thump” seems a very apt title). There are certain stand out tracks (“You don’t know what love is”) and others that are just absurd sounding (Conquest; which is a cover, I’m told). There are lots of screeching guitar solos and very odd lyrics. Most of it seems right off the cuff, recorded “in the moment” without looking back, as we’re told is the standard White Stripes writing process; however, as I have indicated above, it is quite a bit more unrefined and bumpy than usual. How could he have done it so well all the times before? Especially, since they supposedly took the longest on preparing/recording this record (3 weeks) than any of their others. Prepare yourself to open your ears to new sounds from the band, for better or worse.
The best criticism is that there is not much consistency here and it all sounds like B-sides or throwaway tracks. Upon thinking more about it, it almost started making sense to me. This is a band that constantly reinvents their sound with each successive album. Jack White can clearly write a straight forward, catchy, blues rock tune if he wants to, but apparently that’s not all he’s interested in doing with his music. It is rare to hear contemporary music this adventurous. An inconsistent consistency; this album is an instant classic for fans with open ears and tastes.

Standout tracks:
You don’t know what love it (you just do as your told)
Rag and Bone
I’m slowly turning into you
Prickly thorn but sweetly worn
300 mph torrential outpour blues
Effect and cause

fucking yeah!

Cellphone picture collage

Bringing me back

This is like nothing else in the world. Unbelievable. Here is a screen grab of where I used to live in San Francisco, as if you were walking on the street!
First, Green St.

Then on Dolores...

I could show you were I shopped, worked and did laundry. Really. I could. The Internet gets more amazing every day.

Full moon

Last night was a full moon. We drank on the beach until 2am and watched it move across the sky as we talked about sex, music and the war. Then a lone cop emerged out of the darkness and told us we were awesome and pointed to the ocean. "Did you guys see that cruise ship out there?" He was looking for some younger people, but not us. He left us alone and then we went home.


(The pictures in the .gif above, taken by Kristin)

yusuf

Devendra Banhart eat your heart out.

Cat Stevens is amazing.

A night with Rorica...

This Grenache should never have been opened.

Icky Thump Video

The White Stripes return to rad!

Jonathan Haidt

This is amazing. I absolutely love this stuff. (Makes me wonder what I am doing with my life). Jonathan Haidt is the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," a book I read earlier this year, that was also amazing. Professor Haidt is also "Gnarly" Neal Wood's advisor at UVA (for those of you who know him). The above picture will take you to an insightful lecture/interview regarding morality, focusing on the particular differences between Conservative and Liberal thinkers. I watched it last night and it is not as heavy and intellectual as it sounds, I promise. I dare you to watch the whole thing (it's only as long as an episode of Wheel of Fortune and hopefully more rewarding). The second half is better than the first half so don't judge the piece on the first 5 minutes.

Originally uploaded by MShades.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the war! I know that we are not all directly affected by the war going on (every day) and, I dare say many of us are completely numb to it by now as we move about freely in out fast food cable tv nation, but sometimes you get a glimpse of the harsh realities. Part of a recently deceased soldiers' retrieved email (Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr., an infantry squad leader in Baghdad) from a recent magazine article I skimmed at work...

"My squad and I along with my platoon leader 1LT Weber established a strongpoint at the first corner that we approached. I noticed a mutilated child thrown against a wall from random bomb blasts and as I was setting my machine gunner for security, a man was trying to get out of the village with a dead baby in his arms, holding her as if she was still alive along with his wife who could barely walk because her face had been torn open by the bombing. As this all happened at the same time, a man brought a young 10-12 year old boy to me in his arms and it was obvious that the child was barely breathing but still alive. He tried to hand this child to me but I did not want to take my eyes off of all the villagers who were now approaching my position in droves. The man knew that this boy would die so he placed the boy next to a man whose legs had been blown off lying across from me and in the arms of a dead man this boy finally died. I witnessed so much carnage on this particular day that words and descriptions of the horror would become trivial in attempting to paint a picture of what I saw ...
I achieved my 8th confirmed kill in this village when I opened a door to what I thought was just another small room and upon entering, saw human bodies strewn on the floor, wall to wall, that had been placed there because the room had obviously been established as a casualty collection point. One man lying close to the door had been pleading for me to help him and kept pointing to his injured leg. I did not want to commit to entering the room because I had a blind spot to my front left and did not want to be engaged by any survivors; the room was strewn with massive amounts of AK-47's, magazines, grenades and other assortments of weaponry. I motioned for the man to crawl out and he would not or could not comply. He then looked dead into my eyes and suddenly began to smile at me while he reached for his AK-47. I lifted my rifle and fired 8 rounds into his forehead from about 3 feet killing him instantly ...
There was so much sensory overload as to the horrific that I was forced to make my squad work in cycles stacking bodies so that they would not have any mental breakdowns. Our local [Iraqi] interpreter "Ricki" even vomited from seeing this macabre spectacle. I knew that as U.S. forces in Iraq, we were definitely now in an even more unpredictable and unstable environment than I had thought prior to this."
and this...

"I noticed the mother attempting to breast feed her little baby and yet the baby continued to cry. [The interpreter] who is a certified and well educated doctor of internal medicine educated in Iraq, told me that the mother, because she was very frightened by our presence, was not able to breast feed her baby because the glands in the breast close up due to sympathetic responses to fear and stressful situations. I then tried to reassure the mother by allowing her to leave the room and attain some privacy so that she could relax and feed her child. I felt something that had been brooding under the attained callousness of my heart for some time.

My heart finally broke for the Iraqi people. I wanted to just sit down and cry while saying I'm so, so sorry for what we had done. I had the acute sense that we had failed these people. It was at this time, and after an entire year of being deployed and well into the next deployment that I realized something. We burst into homes, frighten the hell out of families, and destroy their homes looking for an elusive enemy. We do this out of fear of the unseen and attempt to compensate for our inability to capture insurgents by swatting mosquitoes with a sledge-hammer in glass houses."

-taken from the cover story in a recent US News and World report magazine.

I got drunk yesterday from an 8 oz glass...

at the VA Beer Festival, also, Rachel's birthday!



Somebody's grandmother serves it up.

Andrew Cronin; empty 8 oz.


Beer Prom photo shoot



Riding home

End of the night.

New Yorker cartoon.

i love emo!

This is a real Norfolk local news television announcement. (Uploaded by Templeton)

I'm at it again...

cell phone sun light shots!

this morning.

this evening.

Rules of engagement

Serve our country, die for our country but don't access Myspace or YouTube outside of our country!!
So now, CNN reports, that the military decided to ban access to Myspace, You Tube and 11 other sites for active military. How else are they to keep up with what is going on at home? This is only going to further isolate the soldiers from their families and what is going on in their homeland. It might sound petty to so many people out there, but that headline seems pretty disastorous to me when I read it and thought about it. Those sites are probably crucially important to so many soldiers, looking forward to coming home. To have this access denied seems really wrong to do to the soldiers.

Rchl

Set my pics free!

I received my MicroSD card in the mail today, so I can finally set free the pictures from my cellphone! They were taken, over the course of the last year or so. Here are a few of my favorite ones...
Chili cheers on the RV tour!

ODU driving range

Sunset Cliffs in San Diego




movement

On the way for a much needed carwash, after birds destroyed my car in like a one hour time frame...

rolling a cigarette...


no hands

"Knocked Up"

Yesterday, a co-worker of mine (a major movie fan) hooked me up with 2 free tickets to see a sneak preview of "Knocked Up." The theater was packed, more than I have ever seen. The movie was absolutely hilarious! I wasn't sure, going in, what to expect (Rachel didn't expect much). I think I can say we were both pleasantly surprised by how funny it was. The plot was pretty basic; a loser/stoner guy successfully 'slams' an up and coming news anchor for E! news, on a one night stand, and gets her pregnant. She decides to keep the baby and well, that's the rest of the movie. It is a comedy, maybe even a "romantic comedy" however, never did it get too stupid in it's comedic appeal or too mushy in its romanticism. It was totally over the top vulgar, crude and crass, but funny all the way through-as soon as the sappy parts started getting too sappy, the laughs followed in perfect time. A rollicking, laugh roller coaster of a movie NOT starring the usual suspects these days (Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, etc.) Lots of great lines, shock value, and funny, well scripted scenes. I can safely say that I would have paid money to see this movie. If I had to assign a grade, as The Cronington Post does: B+

Starts June 1st-go see it!

Stuck in traffic

Today I read a short piece in the New Yorker, regarding a planned initiative from Mayor Michael Bloomberg regarding the ever present issue of traffic congestion in Manhattan. He proposed congestion pricing- charging for the use of certain streets at certain times. As I understood it, this won't be put into place for quite a while but, it has proven results in places like London and Germany. Despite inevitable criticism, it sounds like it could be a good start to the problem of traffic congestion in big cities like New York (particularly in the global warming sense not to mention stress and road rage). From the article,
"The basic idea behind congestion pricing is simple: make motorists pay to use the busiest streets. Under the Mayor’s proposal, an invisible line would be drawn around Manhattan from Eighty-sixth Street south to the Battery. Vehicles crossing this line on weekdays between 6 A.M. and 6 P.M. would be charged a fee—eight dollars for cars, twenty-one dollars for trucks. (Those travelling only within the congestion zone would pay half price, while taxis and livery cabs would be exempt.) The fees would be assessed electronically and could be paid either with a toll pass or over the phone or the Internet."
You can read the full article here. A good Sunday morning read.

candids

two

drinkers

still life

Fly on a wall

To me, this is super rad. A (seemingly) private conversation on Pete Townshend's tourbus with the Raconteurs, including a impromtu song cover. Whatever. Maybe you care... (part I)

maybe you don't. (part II)

I think I need to go listen to The Who right now...

art du déplacement

Hey everybody let's Parkour!