Mundanely Profound

Who's that fellow on the left of my blog?

First of all thanks Erin for trying your best to work through blogspot to try and post comments. I can assume that, if you were able to, you would be posting handfuls of comments for each post praising my insightfulness and making my blog appear to be as popular as this one . I appreciate the support.

Now to what I find almost as fun as um... ... being happy and stuff... I'm talking of course about MAKING MUSIC LISTS!!!!

If you haven't already please check my top 100 (+1 due to a recent addition) albums of all time (not counting very recent purchases, some of which were pretty good), right over here . I hope you find it interesting. It took a while to put it together over the last few months (years?), sometimes having to deal with slow internet connections.

I have told anyone within an earful my complete appreciation for Sirius Satellite Radio . After the initial hardware purchases it is an incredibly inexpensive source of a variety of entertainment, including many intelligent cultural products (varieties of music, news, commentary, NPR shows) that I would be mostly looking for in much more expensive cable TV watching anyway. No audio of the Daily Show yet on there, but there's the Al Franken show!

So anyway, my Sirius Boombox has a feature that lets you save up to 20 songs that pop up on the station your listening to. It then beeps whenever that song plays again. It is pretty much like a 20-song mix CD that continuosly evolves and its nice when your in your daily evening doldrums and then you hear that "beep" and anticipate which of your rarely heard favorites you are going to be blessed with.

So, I would like to present to you the "Top 20 Songs That I Do Not Own in Any Form as Indicated By My Sirius Boombox Memory List". Now, the rankings mean something, because the oldest song (#1) is the one that has stayed on my list the longest, meaning either its a combination of hardly being played plus I to date have not gotten sick of it, which is a pretty big deal given my music attention span. So this post is already long enough here it is:

1) Television - Marquee Moon (send me an mp3 somebody!!)
2) Fela Kuti - Zombie
3) Curtis Mayfield - Pusherman
4) Stone Roses - She Bangs the Drum
5) Spiritualized - Do It All Over Again
6) Beastie Boys - So Watcha' Want
7) Led Zeppelin - Gallow's Pole
8) New Order - Blue Monday
9) Massive Attack - Protection
10) Belle and Sebastian - Storytelling
11) Mission of Burma - That's When I Reach for my Revolver
12) Ricky Nelson - Poor Little Fool
13) Sugar Hill Gang - Apache
14) The Mar-keys - Last Night
15) Dresden Dolls - Coin-Operated Boy
16) Nirvana - You Know You're Right
17) Talking Heads - Road to Nowhere
18) Bright Eyes - Take it Easy (Love Nothing)
19) Blue Swede - Hooked on a Feeling
20) James Gang - Funk #49

Hope you enjoyed that!

I am going to brave weather tonight and go to a Chicago music club for the first time since I've moved here. Place is called the Empty Bottle . Wish me luck as this Iowa bumpkin (albeit a Jewish one) tries to blend. I will spit out the stem of wheat constantly in my teeth, and change out of my overalls with homemade Mogen (Star of) David patches before I leave.

# posted by Zprofound @ 7:31 PM 0 comments

Hi there.

You should all be aware of how great The Fiery Furnaces are . Check them out.

Now, I was by myself in my apartment a few weeks ago kind of lonely in general, but my loneliness was focused on not being able to share my enthusiasm for this band and its interesting lyrics with anyone who would know what I talking about. So I went to a Fiery Furnaces discussion forum to maybe start up a dialogue. You can now follow the fun right here . I posted under Jonah and the jerk or jerks posted under Anonymous.

If you want to sign up for the forum and back me up, feel free to do so. But I previously resisted posting in any of these forums because I thought they were too insignificant. Now I realized that there are people out there who are profoundly bothered if you come into their fake online territory and soil their domain by not following their undeclared rules about what to post, and they actually take the time to obnoxiously tell you about it in a separate post. Geez, what motivates people to do this? They must get some sort of powertrip on it.

I've since let it go, but I liked how I got to tell these people off, and I refrained from using bad language, too. It was my first and last attempt at participation in a discussion forum of that kind, unless I can be directed towards a cool place.

This week so far has been all about interesting recollections of my non-student days, that ended that long distant time of 2.5 months ago. First, I found mention of my professional qualities from Rep. Ed Fallon's campaign site, and today I did a killer presentation and discussion in my Introduction to Planning Theory class that incorporated my most interesting post-graduate job as an organizer for 1000 Friends of Iowa's anti-sprawl campaign in Ames (Amy, that's a town with your name.. golly!).
Look around the website for details on what I was involved in.

It would be very complicated to explain the scope of my presentation. I'm glad I kept my presentation short and covered everything I wanted, and was as little long-winded as possible. What was a great feeling was that I had a sense that I was an expert, that my direct experience in anti-sprawl activisim offered unique insights that were useful to my fellow planning students, all coming from a wide swath of academic and professional backgrounds. These recollections of my past experiences convince me I"m not that negative a guy, especially since that job was very stressful and involved some situations where I felt pretty useless, but overall it was my best job. And I got to be on TV news as a KFOI spokesperson twice!

Tonight after hiding in my apartment when I should be out and about I have two definite Chicago social options at the exact same time.

One is Drinking Liberally - Chicago Chapter .

Second is Booze N' Jews .

To help explain clearly... one group involves liberals... and alcohol.
And the other involves Jews... and alcohol.

Try to guess which ones!

Actually I went to Boozenjews in January after being invited by someone earlier in the day and the bar that it was held at was very loud which wasn't ideal for my way of getting to know a bunch of new people, which is not to only use hand gestures and yelling to get insights into your personality across. Come to think of it, everyone ought to learn sign language, that way we could all communicate at concerts and bars and stuff, even from across the room! Those lucky deaf people.

But I need to read something for class now.

Check out the band The Books while you're at it, commandeth Jonah.

I was google-searching my name for fun, and was reminded to ask "all" of my "readers" to support former boss, state legislator, anti-sprawl advocate, and all-around nice guy Ed Fallonin his campaign to become Iowa's next Governor.

If you need a more personal reason to support him, he was nice enough to mention yours trulyin a campaign newsletter.

Regardless of his policy positions, everyone in Iowa should vote for him based on that reason alone.

What a great play on words, huh?

Well, the combination of many factors has caused some Saturday night insomnia. It's annoying, but I am very happy that this weekend is not like the last two weekends, when I had everything due at once, and it was my first time writing papers for school and doing the academic thing in 1.5 years, so I had all these insecurities about doing it right. But look I survived. And now, academic obligations aren't as urgent, although I had some things to read. If you would like to discuss the difference between 'rationality' and 'rationalization' in the urban planning process, don't ask me, because after reading through this chapter, with a few sections over and over again I still don't understand.

Yeah, so today, despite my desire to meet new Jewish people at the MULTIPLE synagogues in Chicago, I slept in so I couldn't make Satuday morning services. That's all right, I will have a few more chances. I joked around with my friends in Des Moines (all the close ones were not Jewish) that "I hate Jews" because a lot of the ones I met in Des Moines were some of the most vile personalities among human beings I've come across. Hee hee since I am a somewhat religious Jew I can get away with this, but if YOU out there said all the Jewish people you met were jerks and tried to speculate on why those Jews were a certain way, it wouldn't be P.C. Actually I won't go too far into this because I don't want to sound like an Anti-Semitic Jew. Anyway, from the large pool of Jews here, plus the enlightened urban culture, a lot of Jews I come across are going to be decent people, and that has been the case so far.

Although I'm not in with a cool crowd here yet that does cool stuff, I am taking advantage of the incredible choices of movie theaters here. A particular interesting film venue is the Gene Siskel Film Center, where on Tuesday, a day after I turned my final papers in, I rewarded myself by seeing a showcase of Oscar-nominated short films. You know, if you are an Oscar fan, there's those awards they give out for short films that at one point, I thought I would never get to see. Not anymore! And all of the ones I saw were incredible. I think, even with a good movie, it's hard to stay focused on the same storyline for 2+ hours. These short films just build up to a dramatic crescendo and then end, and your left dazzled and puzzled and moved. This post would get long-winded if I talked about each one, but maybe you can find some of these films online, because they are worth the look.
On Thursday, I couldn't control myself and went to the theater again (did I mention at this point I have no TV in my apartment and am often in the need of visual stimluation?) to see The Life Aquatic. This was very good, and the style of the director (who did Royal Tennenbaums and Rushmore) was used very well. What was interesting was at the pivotal final scene, I was really emotionally effected, but unlike other movies with profoundly emotional final moments, the effect of the film wasn't that clear. I began to realize that it wasn't much the character's epiphany in the movie, but rather how the one scene, visually, was consistent with the look of the film and brought all the elements together in a way words can't describe. Rather than heart-wrenching, it was very magical. So see that movie too.

I don't have an energy for a political rant, although the cover story for the print version of The Chicago Reader is about a young Republican pundit who runs a debate show at Northwestern.

Following political news, and the statements of conservative politicians, Young Republicans to me are so sad. This is because a fundamental theme through nearly all Republican policies is well to put it bluntly... "WE DON'T CARE ABOUT THE NEXT GENERATION, JUST PASS LAWS THAT HELP ME, NOW, FOR ME, MONEY FOR ME, AND MAYBE SOME TO MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY... AND MAKE SURE MY LEGITIMATE CHILDREN HAVE SOME SAFE PLACE TO LIVE WHEN WORLD WAR III STARTS, MAYBE A MOON BASE OR SOMETHING". Okay, a fundamental theme wouldn't be that long. But my point is, younger people are voting for Democrats more, and perhaps they are doing this because of all the selfish and uptight and oblivious-to-the-future posturing Republicans do? Because I know Bush is God-fearing man, but the way Cheney, and Rice, and Rumsfeld and their apologizers conduct themselves, I believe that they are getting off on as much power as they can before they die. And if what they do causes long-term trauma for the U.S., who cares, because then we'll be dead.

Whoa boy, this is getting heavy, and I'm capable of discussing issues rationally to. My prescritpion: an episode of Mr. Show on DVD and then bedrest.

Oh might as well check out the best current underground band in the universe while you are at it.