Hipster Films must stop!

Between 500 Days of Summer and Paper Heart, I have officially grown a massive hatred of hipster movies. If I see any more handicams, sixties retro, chuck taylors, michael cera, sweater vests, long sleeve shirts over short sleeve shirts over long sleeve shirts or indy rock soundtracks I am going to puke. If I had known Garden State would have caused such an onslaught of crap, I would have gone back in time to snipe Zach Braff and save the world the heartache of all the talented filmmakers being homogenized into, at best, what a great salmon dinner tastes like when it repeats on you.

A message to all of those out there who think that sadness makes your film great: you're a fucking asshole. If you write a movie about not actually falling in love with the same mechanical schema as regular romantic movies then all you do is dissapoint. People don't watch movies to be disapointed they watch them to escape. Escape from the banal existence where people don't get the one they love, where they don't get their dreams, where they aren't able to pull it out and make the impossible possible. There's plenty of that in the real world, stop fucking putting it into my movies where I go to get away from all the bullshit. Movies should be an inspiration. 500 Days of Summer is obviously a movie that tells itself that its ok to have 2 hours of sad painful horribleness as long as you have a 30 second snippet of faith renewal, well guess what, it doesn't take the math classes you hipsters loathe to figure out that the time doesn't equate. You still feel like shit after and your movie is still pointless as fuck.

Enough.

Finally! Rap endorses drunk driving!

For years Rap music has been the apex of both coolness and criminal activity in modern society. Although it began in the humble slums as a unified symbol of the black will to be more educated and stand by one another, ala KRS-One; CL Smooth, EPMD etc. Rap quickly devolved into what was more prevalent in the poor neighborhoods of America: crime. No one chooses to live in a ghetto unless they've already been convinced that it's their home. Certainly no one with money would live in a ghetto unless they were getting it illegally or they loved the place. Rap started with love and has been leaning more and more towards the illegal ever since the early nineties, "Fuck the police!" anyone?

What I find more interesting is that they just seemed to jump straight to murdering felons from near saints. Finally, modern rap is taking a turn towards the moderate: the party animal. Rappers chose to talk about respecting their women and then jumped straight to rape and buying women's attention while still severely disrespecting them. Now, rappers are talking about getting girls drunk, smoking weed, driving nice cars, and now finally with Kid Cudi, there is a song that talks about drinking and driving, the crime most white people do.

Enjoy:

Music Makes me believe in God

Music makes me believe in God. Some sports teams transcend their competition by way of the inspiration of one player who just alters your idea of what’s possible. Jimi Hendrix, Thelonius Monk, Stevie Ray Vaughn, these are all the Michael Jordan’s of their bands. The band exists as a competitive entity as a result of the singular effort and talent of the one individual. Although this music frequently amazes me and inspires me to what could be construed as a higher level of consciousness, the music that makes me believe in god juxtaposes the jarring rhythms of the street with a confluence of mind, body, spirit, instrument, and audience in a way that confounds the reaches of all logic and science.

When you see the Avett Brothers emotional effusions sprout from the porch-strummed banjo picking ensemble, or John Lee Hooker’s Hobo Blues rock up from the seat of your pants like you were sitting on the tracks of an impending train, you feel the hand of god reach down and infuse the inanimate in a way that only something supernatural could. Dictionary.com defines faith as “belief that is not based on proof.” The best bands exhibit their faith in one another every night; playing every song with a new soul-infused faith: faith that their bandmates will fill the silence with a beautiful solo, faith that they won’t mispluck or crack their voice at the wrong moment, faith that everyone will “get it.” The greatest moments of any band create a third entity, the song, an entity that does not exist in any of the musicians individually but intimately flows between them all simultaneously like one heart pumping the blood of every member.

Blake, as well as many others during the early romantic period, argued that man was created in the image of god not by his literal appearance but because god infused man with the ability to create, the ability to mimic gods greatest achievements, his greatest creations. The best band mixes music like a recipe in which the chefs are held at gunpoint for all misappropriations, all miscues, ruin the entire recipe, starving the audience from the soul feeding bread that they came to enjoy in unison. The best concert creates an invisible entity that everyone can see; the feelings, the ups and the downs that the band creates, the crescendos and valleys sway the heads of onlookers, homogenized by the power of the music.

The equal dispersion of talent across a band allows the listener to take responsibility for the feelings they share with the other listeners. The struggle of man is to fend off loneliness by communicating and the good band provides a forum for all to communicate simultaneously without speaking a word. The mere acknowledgement of the music allows one to recognize in another that which aches in him or herself. God, for me, never posed atop a cloud flinging lightning bolts on sinners and dividing humanity into the hell-bound and the heaven driven. God is the eventual breakdown of the mental barriers that make people think that they are unlike one another. God is the beauty of the conjoined efforts of humanity, and music presents the disease for God’s cure. When music itches, we all scratch and the unified scratching helps us to realize that we all have itches, we all hunger, we all thirst, we all need, and we’ll all die, but somehow humanity, as a whole, trudges on towards a greatness—a greatness that is irrefutably evident in the efforts of melding musicians.