Sit back, relax, really experience the painting...

There's something to be said for getting around the museum virtually and a bit faster. You miss all the detail, the arrangement of the space, but you mostly waste time taking a longer look at paintings that don't deserve it, anyhow. If you don't get it quickly, then what, spend every day looking at the painting as a sort of transcendental meditation? You can do that with literally anything. That's kind of the point of the meditation.. What I mean is, I rarely walk through a museum and am suddenly hit by new revelations about a painting while looking at it. I know that's what's supposed to happen, but honestly, who has the time? there ought to be a fast way to just get the gist of it. Even the descriptions are weirdly long and involving stories usually..

Rappers need more Movie scores

I usually don't write about rap because most of it doesn't do anything for me. But since there's a full-on rap assault on mainstream pop going on, there's been some cool pop songs coming out and you find yourself looking up some songs. But this guy isn't really in that group, on the same label though. There's subtle auto-tuning for once and I like the way the rap is missing the beat until the syncopation sets in. But what I love is the orchestra sample, giving the whole thing a wonderful patina of early sixties movie cocktail parties. So many rappers are content to loop an abstract beat pattern and a minimalist sample and try to put all the expressive content in the lyrics, which stretches a lot of these guys' singing abilities past the breaking point. Auto-tune is a decent fix for this problem, but a richer, more layered sample gets the point across much better.

Better pranks on Chatroulette!

Chatroulette has already evolved from a pretty random concept to a great place for messing with strangers, but nobody buys the girls taking their tops fake videos anymore, and honestly who wants to see a bunch of guys jerking off anyway? It's the priceless reactions when your fake video cuts out and you get an embarrased guy stumbling for the computer with his pants around his ankles. This guy really makes the most of the it, just reaction shots all of the time. His antics are fine, but the reactions are just great. I love the fact that so many people seem genuinely happy to see an unconvincing tranny dancing to Lady Gaga.

Obama raping the country, angry Jon Voight exclaims...

Christ, this just goes to show some people shouldn't be reading about politics. You can see why Angelina Jolie has issues with the dude. The alinski method is apparently a socio-dynamic technique that liberals are taught to make it possible for them to talk you out of stupid things. Maybe there should be a 'real america' where everyone on Fox news could go live and just slowly die because no one remembers what western Medicine is. This kind of stuff is just so out there, where's it all going to end? When is political debate going to go back to normal? The problems just seem to be mounting up, but no one seems to be doing anything about them. It's necessary for there to be conservatives and progressives on all issues, but why do the conservatives have to be so crazy? And what the hell do they have to say before people acknowledge that they're insane?

The Cult of Originality

That video was pretty original, wouldn't you say? But it's still self-consciously aping another type of show, even parodying it, and it's certainly not the first to do that. This is the problem with originality, truly totally original works are completely impossible to understand or relate to, there really is no appreciable difference between it and a complete non-sequitur. When talking about originality, you're really taking as a given that's still recognisable as being part of a genre, or an established body of work. We live in more reflective times than in the last century, there seems to be more nostalgia, more influence, more references than ever before. Unfortunately forthose enamoured with the new, this is what it's usually like. The last century saw some entirely new media coming to dominate, and because of that, originality was the in plentiful supply. Those days are over now, we've returned to the status quo of reference in art. But the sustained burst of originality has left us a little different. Reference, homage, parody, when recognised as such, is now less, not more. We're more like late-renaissance artists, in that there is a large past of original geniuses behind us, but we have superior tools and knowledge. In their case it was Christianity that made them superior to the heathens, in our case it's freely available knowledge and technology. But they were relatively humble, seeking to emulate, adding only Christian moral philosophy and emulating in every other aspect, we are still chasing that elusive phantom, the completely original work that everyone regognises as a masterpiece.