The Hobbit - The Desolation of Smaug

We have a few scientific lessons to teach about the series of Hobbit movies by Peter Jackson in an attempt to help him contain his movies to one single event, instead of spreading his vision out across multiple hours of effort and millions of wasted dollars. 

Lesson One.  Modern science suggests that our brains make up our surroundings.  Our field of vision is a fairly small focused section.  When we turn away from an object, our brains are creating in our heads the third dimensional space that surrounds us.  Quantum Mechanics also suggests that when we look at an atom, it is present, but when we look away, it disappears into a multiplicity of waves.  This is called the Observer Effect.  Atoms stand still when we observe them, but move around when we do not.

Lesson two.  There is an idea of a collective conscience.  We all look at the sky, and we say it is blue.  An individual can't tell the rest of us that the sky is purple, because the strength of everyone's common belief turns the sky blue in our minds.  This is inescapable.  Again, it seems that together we exude an energy that creates the world around us. 

So let's apply this to the Hobbit series with the question: are there three movies in this series because no one goes to watch them?  If we were to watch them, then it could be contained in one single event we call a movie.  But because everyone turns away from this movie, the event is contained in a never ending wave of multiplicities.  So please, everyone, go out and see this movie so we can end this fucking thing.

karat y chop

Psilosamples - Mental Surf

There's something about eating the mushrooms in our front yard that makes sound a little brighter.  As we worked our way through Mental Surf, the birds outside took notice and started to chirp along with the beats.  The ambulance sirens circling our neighborhood found their space for a solo.  The police choppers overhead beat their propellers to the music.

Our mood became a bit more giddy.  We couldn't help but jump around to the skittering loops and electronic beeps and bloops.  Moments from the album are very familiar to groups like Land of the Loops, High Llamas or Django Django.  The territory is familiar, but the experience is under a different kind of influence.

Furthermore, Karat and I are SB1070s.  After we ate the mushrooms from our yard, the language on this album was suddenly unfamiliar, like Spanish being spoken underwater.  The writing on the album, too, started to swim around and multiply in vowels, while the letters themselves began to flourish across the album art.

So here we are, naked again in the front yard of our apartment complex, dancing with the birds, listening to the approaching sirens, banging our heads to the reverberations from the police helicopter overhead, and speaking in a new found tongue.  The biggest coinkydink about all these things converging on our apartment right now is that we only discovered this album as if heaven sent to our doorstep after we ate those yard mushrooms.

chop

Skippy

Here's a vision of Skippy.  She's dead and she was replaced by Pearly.  We wrote her a poem:

Skip died of lethal injection
Her attitude was yellow bile

We told the warden to call it off
but she had already convinced herself
that morning at McDonald's

We called the warden again at dinner time
and she was fine 

We had already wept for yellow dog
and we ordered a pizza of
pepperoni
mushroom
and onion

karat y chop

Pearly

Good night, Pearly.  Pearly is dead.  She's been replaced by Bella.  Bella's previous owner beat her.  So she hides under the bed most the time.  We can't get her out in the daylight long enough to draw a picture of her.  Good morning, Bella.

karat y chop

The Oneness of Juju - African Rhythms

Hey whistleblowers, we have a track for you.  Check out "Every Way But Loose" by Oneness of JuJu.  Research turned up that this song was used in the video game Grand Theft Auto.  Like most Americans, we live in a small apartment, and our freeloading roommate quit helping us pay the rent when he fell into a paralyzing depression.  Much of his time is spent on the couch playing GTA 5, and we never heard this track.  We also started to think that "depression" is his codeword for "really great video game."

This track was produced in 1982.  Seconds into it, we made connections to bands like OUT HUD and !!!.  These later bands started around 1996, and we always wondered their influences.  We think we can put a finger on this one.

So now we are running naked around the living room couch with the stereo turned up, blowing whistles and kazoos in our roommate's ear.  Then we run back to our tiny bedroom and laugh our asses off.  He just keeps yelling at us from the couch.  We even got our children running around naked with whistles.  Our roomie is a registered sex offender, and he still won't get off the couch.  Must be one great video game or he sure is in one hell of a funk.  Afro funk! 

karat y chop

The Polish Cottage

Let us suppose that A and B are hungry and both suffer intensely from their hunger.  Let us assume that there is a menu at Polish Cottage that could help them in their hunger, which could physically change the state of their empty stomachs, but it takes a great deal of energy and courage to make the trip and choose a menu item.  Let us suppose that A has the energy and courage while B lacks it.  A makes the trip and fills their stomach.  B just gets more and more hungry and more and more miserable.  Now it is true that A helped form their own later satiation.  But their starting point, their desire to satiate their hunger, their energy, their courage, were already there.  They may or may not have been the result of previous effort, and the effort at that time was the result of factors that were not of their making.

Are these two people any better for the choices they have made?  We have to thank Paul Edwards for this intuition pump, and Edwards might say that we are determined to make a decision.  We may feel like we have the freewill to choose one from the other, but the determination of choice is still at the crux of this situation.  The problem is worsened by the fact that you still have to choose a menu item once you've raced through traffic to eat here.  Will you choose between the Polish sausage or the Polish wiener?  Will you choose between the strawberry crepe, the blueberry crepe or the sour cream crepe?  Choice, it seems, can still presuppose determinism, even if it is a soft, pierog determinism.  But pierog are rarely served singularly.  So it seems we still have to make a choice.

karat y chop

Seoul Kitchen

South Korea is the penis of the world.  Uruguay is its vagina.  We don't just make this stuff up.  Chop dated a Hangug-eo in college.  So we still think of ourselves as Korean at heart.

One of the best experience we can remember of visiting South Korea is the Jimjilbong.  The locker rooms, hot tubs and wet saunas are separated for men and women and you don' wear your clothes until you come up top to the unisex dry saunas.  One dry sauna in particular has a small wooden door leading to a mud lined dome with a coal fire in the corner.  You have to literally crawl into this sauna, and it's one of the hottest.

Another memory we have is taking the midnight train to Hwanseon Caves in Gangwon-do to watch the sunrise.  It was dead of winter and we traveled through the night to reach our location.  Yet, we still had to wait a few hours before sunrise.  It was so intensely cold that we crowded into the train station with everyone else, and we all huddled around the single heater in the middle of the room.  Here we waited for hours.  One old man rolled his hard boiled egg around the top of the heater to warm it before he ate.  We so much wanted this man's egg.  And he rolled it around and around, warming it on all sides, knowing that he was closest to the heater, and he was the owner of the object of everyone's desire.

Seoul Kitchen could make up the distance between the dome shaped, coal fire sauna and that man's hard boiled egg.  You have the old woman sitting with her eyes closed in the corner.  You have the crowds gathered around one another at the tables.  You wait for the sunrise of your meal.  And with every passing dish, you patiently covet your neighbor's food.  Then the hot food comes and you burn your mouth in haste.

karat

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings Live 3-20-14

We realize this world is full on "No." A little girl wants a second helping of dessert, and momma wags her finger, "no."  A young man applies for graduate school, and the director of graduate admissions types a word, "no."  A grown woman smokes pot in her backyard, and the judge bangs his gavel, "no."

Often times this makes us want to scream and shout.  However, negation and affirmation are part of the same question.  When we question something, we work with a judgement that it "could not be so,"...and then we need to go ahead and check anyway.

So was the dilemma on whether to fork out the $6.50 surcharge for Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings last night.  That's actually $13 in fines for Karat and me.  This was 25% of the ticket price.  And we wondered what it would be like if we didn't pay the fines.  If our vague examples from experience have taught us anything, you have to face some challenges.  There is no better assertion of your existence than to place yourself there.  For to deny yourself is a grave misfortune.

Pump your intuition.  Eat a second helping of dessert.  Go to graduate school.  Smoke your pot.  Or don't, but if you want to and you don't, then this is still your definition of self.  We went to the show and we got out our screaming and our shouting, and some twisting, and some mash potato, and some funky chicken, and a little roger rabbit.  So, this assertion of self was a win win.

Chop

Neil Young - Tonight's the Night

Look at this guy!  Tonight's the Night was originally released in 1975, and a tribute to then recently deceased Crazy Horse and Bruce Berry.  Why don't more celebrities die of drug overdoses these days, we're looking at you Lady Gaga; but our eyes are diverted from the ghost of Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Hoffman's death pisses us off too much to fully approach that subject.  Our dad used to sing to us, "You can never come back, when your out of the blue and into the black."  Yes, Chop and I are siblings, and we're married.  People choose their existences.  Accept it.

Long before we put it together that these were Neil lyrics, we were rocking out to Never Mind the Bollocks in our bedrooms across the hall from one another.  We tried to see who could play it the loudest.  But some things come full circle.  Neil realized this when he framed his album with "Tonight's the Night".  So it might make sense that we would attempt a review of an album almost forty years old.  But what makes Tonight's the Night album relevant?  Maybe it's the fact that much of the world existed before Chop and I were born.  Maybe it's just the fact that each of us continues to make discoveries as we grow older.

The minor point is that Neil couldn't have written a song like "Hey Hey My My" without experiencing the death of those good classmates around him.  With the recently departed Hoffman, we realize the loss of opportunity for another celebrity turned politician.  So before we all go out of the blue and into the black, know that tonight's the night.  Take Neil's advice and open up those tired eyes.

Karat

300 - Rise of a Nation

Karat and I were born conjoined.  We were separated at birth.  Then we married in the early 2000's.  We divorced in 2009.  We recently renewed our vows of marriage.  This is much like the story of Athens and Sparta in 300 - Rise of an Empire.

In this telling of Frank Miller's Xerxes, we follow the Athenians as they battle for good against the evil Persians.  Good is the idea of freedom overtly discussed in speeches given by Themistocles to his Athenian soldiers.  Evil is the shackled galley slaves who row the Persian boats.  The story begins shortly after the conflict between the Persians and the 300 Spartans of the previous movie.  I commented that the movie contained more six packs than a liquor store.  Karat commented that there were more big hunks than a candy store.

However, both of us ignored the portrayal of the Persians.  Instead, we headed out afterward to eat dinner at a local Pakistani restaurant called Zam Zam, which satiated our interest in the unknown.  300 - Rise of an Empire dwells in this vacuum of uncertainty.  This is a stylized fictionalization of the past, where history is created.  In fact, once we commenced our dinner, the movie experience had already taken place in the past.  The present was curry goat.  That, too, is now the past.  The point is, our dinner wasn't of Persian food.  It was close, but it isn't correct to say that this was Persian food.  So take 300 - Rise of  Nation with a drizzle of Raita on your Naan, and don't mistake an approximation of truth for truth. 

Chop

New Schools

Students,

It's been too long since our last visit to class.  But we're glad you have all assembled here.  We went through a nasty divorce since we started our blog.  But we decided to make amends for the sake of our children.  The marriage is back on!  What a wild tip, after violations of the law, jail time, and paying off nearly all of our fines.  We're out the gates...again.  Welcome and enjoy the rest of the semester.

karat y chop