21stcenturygonzo.com

Dirt Nasty – “1980″

The glass breaking is so loud it causes silence.
The quiet murmoring in the cafe ceases, and only the quiet but profuse apologies of the obviously mortified women can be heard.
She has the look of a women who has just killed a pedestrian at the end of a drunken bender, rather then woman who has just knocked over her mimosa.

Earlier, walking thru Palazzo, I heard a women shout into her cell phone “I don’t need a man I’m good with god” .

it didn’t look like she meant it.

Last night was glamourous, bright lights, laughter, and everyone was celebrating.  This morning I wonder if anyone can remember what we were all so happy about.
Vegas feels much different in the morning.  Generally I never see the daylight hours when I’m here, but since I haven’t slept yet and the room service at vdara is terribad, I’m forced to venture out into the day which makes me wonder:

Why the fuck would anyone choose to be concious during the day here?

You think Titanic was sad? wait till you see grandma chain smoking menthols while speed hammering the slot button at 11am on a Tuesday.

The waitress rushes over with some napkins and starts mopping up the orange juice and champagne.  The lady won’t stop apologizing, I try not to stare at her but I am hypnotized by her irrational guilt.

Her husband glanced up quickly, shot her an annoyed look, then went back to his paper.
I’m the only one still paying any attention to her and yet in her face you can see she believes the entire debacle is being broadcast live on national tv.

When you’re out at night everyone seems beautiful and ecstatic, at 7am everyone looks sad and terminal.

Vegas nights are pretty incredible, but Vegas during the day is depressing as fuck.

unlikely friends

so someone posted a question about the finale of LOST on 2p2 and i wrote up a response which went on longer then i anticipated.
and since i’m sure his question is pretty germaine to most at the moment i figured i’d repost my response here.
i am far from an expert on LOST, i have only watched the series one time through and have not spent hours pouring over the episodes looking for clues to deeper meaning, so if this comes across as elementary or superficial, i apologize.
it is only meant as my gut reaction to what i thought to be a wonderfully engaging series and a fantastic ending.
this post was not edited for content or grammar so excuse any errors of such.

the question was whether everyone had died in the initial plane crash and the entire series was them in purgatory.

“no everything that happened on the island actually happened. my theory is that the people were brought to the island because they all had serious issues in their life, they were able to redeem themselves thru their actions on the island, both to others and to themselves.
the island therefore and the people on it were the most important aspects of their lives, so once they passed on, it was those memories that were significant enough to awaken their conciousness in purgatory and allow them to move on.
there are various theories, some that hurley created the purgatory state to allow them to all meet up again etc, however one could argue that it wasn’t so much that the alternate reality was created specifically for them, but that it exists for everyone, and only when you are “ready to move on” which according to lost occurs when you gain conciousness that the purgatory state you are existing in is not your actual life, do you ascend to heaven.
desmond clearly had a remarkable ability to move between realities, and he used this gift to help awaken his fellow losties in their purgatory state, however much like the entire theme of the show, they waited to move on until they all had woken up, and big shock jack was the last to do so.
there were various references to people not being ready yet, whether due to not having realized the true nature of purgatory (like daniel) or not having redeemed themselves fully (benjamin), and so it doesn’t really make sense to think that this alternate reality was created by hurley or the losties or w/e, as clearly there are other characters they left behind that are still working on readying themselves so they could move on.
the smoke monster was the devil, or whatever you want to call evil.
notice how throughout season 6 he kept trying to convince the castaways to leave the island WITH HIM, and offered to give them their greatest wish (for sayid that was nadia, for sawyer simply leaving)…notice how he wasn’t truly interested in killing them so much as stealing their souls and having them choose evil over good (remember the initial conversations between MIB and jacob).
basically what you can take away from it, is a giant morality tale, which in the end attempts to offer some solace to people who have lost loved ones and also had some sweet action/suspence along the way.
that they didn’t tie up every single loose end/mystery is irrelevant to the point of the show, and those that scream that they never found out who was shooting at the outrigger, or who built the statue etc, are missing the point, which is ironic as missing the point of the show is kinda the whole point of the show.
one could conceivably argue that the island was a metaphor and could exist for everyone as some real world catalyst that allows you to put aside your past failures and redeem yourself so that you find peace within yourself and can move on to another level of conciousness, however for the purpose of the show it is clear that it was meant to be a real physical existing island that indeed had magical powers and the ability to move thru time and space.
the why what when where and how of it all is left to science fiction, and had they devoted the last few episodes to simply creating some psuedo-scientific explanation i think it would have been a giant let down.
much like in life, to fully enjoy lost you must be willing to accept there are things you cannot/will not understand, and simply let go and enjoy the ride.
at least in my opinion.”

ok so this was shot after a long night out of drinking. It is not doctored or fabricated in any way whatsoever.

i have a dart board in my house but i use it very infrequently and am only moderately skilled at darts.

OR SO I THOUGHT!!!

BEHOLD: (please keep in mind that true genius is often not appreciated in its own time)

ok MAYBE he’s tied with my dog for the coolest….

Skateboarding Dog HD Redux

first off do not read this if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

went to see avatar in 3D tonight and let me preface what follows by saying that i really enjoyed the experience, the special effects were incredible, and the 3D experience lived up to the hype.
that being said, i thought it was pretty sad that cameron could create something so technically innovative and be so completely uncreative in the actual storytelling.
i mean the story was UNBELIEVABLY uncreative, almost shockingly so.
it has absolutely nothing original or creative to say, period.
it was basically “Ferngully the last rainforest 3D” and/or “the story of the native americans”.

there wasn’t a single plot twist, or any event in the movie that wasn’t completely predictable, and not even predictable in the general sense of hollywood blockbusters, its almost hard to accept that cameron gave himself a writing credit when he didn’t really write anything other then coming up with new names for characters.

you would think that he would have put an ounce of creative energy into the story for his masterpiece of innovative filmaking…i guess he figured everyone would be so overwhelmed by the 3D effects no one would care about the plot.

now before you start assuming i’m just another jaded movie snob/cynic, i wasn’t going into this expecting some amazing narrative, and while i was in the theatre i wasn’t overly bothered by the complete lack of a original plotline,
i simply enjoyed the sweet effects and 3D experience.
however after the movie ended it would be impossible to reflect on the film without wondering how on earth no one involved with the making of the movie cared so little about the fact that there wasn’t ONE SINGLE PLOT ELEMENT that had anything REMOTELY interesting/original to add to the discourse.
my comparison to “ferngully the last rainforest” was not hyperbolic in any sense, it was a literal statement, in fact if i were the producers of that movie i would seriously consider avatar to be a blatant work of plagiarism.

what i found most hilarious about the movie, was that the entire source of conflict in the movie, the catalyst for the entire plot was so LOL absurd.
let me lay a little groundwork so you can understand the ridiculousness.

the whole reason that the plot of the movie unfolds is because one clan of the indigenous people of pandora are living ontop of a huge deposit of some new element that is worth a fuckton of money on earth, and some evil corporation wants to mine it.
the people obviously don’t want to move and the corporation needs to demolish every living thing ontop of the deposit so they can mine the area.

the indigenous people are not overtly hostile to the humans, in fact they are curious and accepting of several of the scientists they just don’t like the ones who try to blow them up.

now here is the part where its hard to suspend your disbelief.

its the year 2154 and mankind has the technological abilty to travel to the far reaches of the universe to the planet pandora.
we have amazingly advanced technology both in weaponry and science and are able to create and operate the “avatars” (which i’m not going to explain as if you haven’t seen the movie you shouldn’t even be reading this).

however we have NO POSSIBLE MEANS OF MINING deposits from the earth other then demolishing everything in site ontop of the areas we want to mine.

the only possible way for us to retrieve this valuable resource is by destroying every living thing surrounding it.

basically while we have made amazing advances in every technological aspect of our existence, we still mine like we did in 1856.

the resources the corporation is expending in the movie to mine this element has to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars (hell just the budget for the military contractors they employ must be close to a billion dollars).

the people on pandora don’t seem to have any use whatsoever for the resource in question, so its pretty logical to assume that if they could somehow manage to devise a way to mine the rock they want without completely destroying the land and displacing the population they would face no opposition from the natives and could save about a billion dollars in military costs.

but instead they just decide to wage (an ultimately unsuccessful) all out war.

now i’m all for the suspension of disbelief but this was just too much even for me.
and even if i could somehow be convinced that the physics of mining resources from the earth are such that it will never be possible to do it in a way that doesn’t severely damage the immediate area to the point where that land becomes wholly uninhabitable, the plot of the movie was still insultingly uncreative.

let me sum it up for you.

bad white men come to someone else’s land looking for a natural resource that is valuable.
the natives are peaceful earth loving people who have a great respect for nature and the earth.

one of the humans starts to live among them and gains a newfound respect for their culture and realizes what is happening to them is wrong.
he also just so happens to fall in love with one of their women.

first he tries to reason with his own people but they are too greedy and don’t care about nature or other people, just money, so he has to fight to protect his new people.

at first the humans technology and weaponry is too powerful, but the native people use cunning, and above all else the WILL TO SURVIVE and protect their way of life and in the end overcome all odds and are victorious.

of course along the way the hero and his new special lady friend have a huge blow-up and it appears as though they will never love each other again, but thankfully by the end of the movie the hero is able to prove himself to her and win back her affection.

sound familiar?

now i realize that many hollywood movies are predictable and formulaic, however for the most part the writers/director attempts to put in at least a few minor suprises or plot twists.

there was not one single thing in this entire movie that had any trace or semblence of creativity, other then the special effects.

and i understand that cameron’s goal in this movie was to showcase the new technology of 3D etc, however you gotta figure he could have spent at least 10mins working on the story at some point in production, rather then just copy another story almost exactly.

i dunno, maybe he thought if he set it in the future on another planet that counted as changing the story?

if so you should be on the lookout for my awesome new sci-fi movie.

its set in the year 2256 on the planet zoltron, and its all about this huge spaceship that everyone thinks can’t crash and on its maiden voyage it hits a meteor and starts to slowly crash, however that will just be the background for the real plot focus which is a cross-class romance that is doomed from the start…oh man its gonna be a real tear-jerker.

that being said if you enjoy special effects at all you should def see it in the theatre with 3D, as you could watch the entire movie without hearing a word of dialogue and it wouldn’t make a difference.

so the vibe of this show was awful.

without exception every comic who got up before me TOTALLY BOMBED in a big way and so the crowd was really dead.

not sure i can even call it a crowd as most people started filing out early, and by the time i got up there was only a handful of people left, and none of them had laughed in hours.

so wasn’t exactly a good atmosphere and i started off real meh however by the end of my set i got more comfortable and the crowd had warmed up a decent amount, and i actually got alot of good feedback from other comics after the show.

my material was just so/so but at least i had a more upbeat energy whereas the rest of the night people had just been super dead.

this set marked a much different direction for me as i didn’t really have any “bits” like my other sets did, rather i tried to just talk about stuff that actually had happened to me, and make it more like i was just having a natural conversation with the audience.

i really don’t like the “jokey” made up bits (altho i still really like my female president bit) and i def want to focus more on a natural stream of conciousness style.

clearly i need a ton more practice and material etc, but was just trying a new approach.

please lemme know any thoughts, suggestions you have.

cheers.

annies sf

so i went to take my written test for class M (motorcycle) license at DMV.
you can get 4 answers wrong out of i think it was 22 (dont remember exact number).

i obv haven’t studied whatsoever figuring i can rely on common sense…so i take the test and im pretty confident in most of my answers, but there are 4 where im just making an educated guess and the questions are pretty obscure, for instance one that i remember was “when riding in a staggered formation and passing, the lead driver should:

a) return to the center of the lane
b) return to the right portion of the lane
c) return to the left portion of the lane
d) i don’t remember what the 4th option was.

so i figure what the hell i’ll goggle the 4 questions im not sure about on my phone and make sure (no i do not have any qualms about cheating on a dmv test)

anyways i google them and  for all 4 of them google tells me quite definitively that the other option is the correct one so i change all 4.

i go get it graded and  on every single one of the answers i changed, my original guess was correct and i end up getting 5 wrong.

FUCK YOU GOOGLE.

how on earth do i know more about california motorcycle law by simply guessing, then fucking google???

its almost like google was purposely trying to teach me a lesson about cheating.

and its not even like the answers google gave were vague or whatever…they were exactly word for word one of the options on the multiple choice test.