On the 8 Spot

Image by Andrew Huff via Flickr

Read the whole thing here , I didn’t want to post the whole review.

Nice Movie Review from /film

But what I appreciated most was the way that the film captured the modern American male condition with thought and humor. On the whole, when men get married, study after study has demonstrated that they are more likely to depend more on their spouses for emotional support than they do on others, as opposed to females, who are typically able to maintain a more extensive social network. As a result, widowed men experience higher rates of depression and shorter periods until remarriage. When you couple this with conclusions such as those found in sociologists Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, you end up with a profound cynicism about the emotional life of the modern American male that’s become fairly pervasive in our culture (see: Fight Club). Putnam paints a pretty bleak picture of American social life, claiming that the ties that have bound us in our communities (e.g. bowling leagues) have withered dramatically to the detriment of civic engagement. In other words, these days, it’s difficult for men to keep quality male friends, and even harder for them to make new ones.

via Movie Review: I Love You, Man – Capturing the Modern American Male Condition | /Film.

There Is But One Race…So Say We All–

I don’t know why but I feel I am in a precarious emotional state right now, so take these words with a grain of salt,

I loved this video!

Edward James Olmos, on his authority as Admiral of the Battlestar Galactica, tells the assembled crowd at the United Nations there is no race but the human race (so say we all).

Read the whole thing, this is but half of it (but of course the good parts here)

Take the following passage from a series of lectures he gave, in California, in May of 1999 (collected in the book The Vital Illusion), in which he limns our era:

Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.

Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.

Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.

Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.

Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex …

Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.

If a clearer depiction of realtime exists, I have not come upon it in my inchworm meanderings.

The fact that Baudrillard could so clearly describe the twitterification phenomenon ten years before it became a phenomenon reveals that the phrase “new media,” when used to describe the exchange of digital messages over the Internet, is a coinage of the fabulist. What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them. <Emphasis Mine>

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: More present than the present.

The youtube video of this song cannot be view in the Philippines damn youtube.

Great Romantic – Tunde

Hey, so you threw your heart right in

And it turned out less than perfect

A losing streak is starting in your mind

You let yourself believe the pain

Is never gonna be worth it

Don’t beat yourself up

Know that you were never wrong for wishful thinking

So you done lost the battle

Should we just cross out your name and let you sink

You got me feeling like the last surviving

Great romantic

But stop dreaming and the world stops spinning around

You feel foolish cause love never turns out

Like you planned it

But stop believing and the world starts letting you down

So, you had to let it go

It clearly wasn’t working

A new love leaves you trembling

You hide behind the door

So unsure of what you used to know

So now you think you’re every move ten steps ahead

And you are frozen

Caught inside yourself

You’re drowning as the anger overflows

You got me feeling like the last surviving

Great romantic

But stop dreaming and the world stops spinning around

You feel foolish cause love never turns out

Like you planned it

But stop believing and the world starts letting you down

You got me feeling like the last surviving

Great romantic

But stop dreaming and the world stops spinning around

You feel foolish cause love never turns out

Like you planned it

But stop believing and the world starts letting you down

So…

via Tunde – Great Romantic LYRICS.

UPDATE: Forgot to say that I learned about this song at a friend blog post.