Tuesday, May 22, 2012

***** Quantum by Planet X: Regular People Say, “Turn that xxxx Down!”


Who are these regular people?  These would be the regular people that say my reviews aren’t helpful.  I am a huge fan of Planet X.  Planet X is one of those bands that if a regular person hears them expect, “Turn that xxxx down!”  I have been a fan of them since they started, and I will probably always hold them in high regard.  Quantum is perhaps Planet X’s best album to date.  It goes without say that with players like these that Planet X is going to put out nothing but the highest quality music.  Really, Planet X is a contemporary jazz band, and one of the few that have actually gained a following in my generation.  If you want a pop album, then that is not what you will get with Quantum though the song writing is superb.  If you want to fit in, good luck if you listen to Planet X.  In fact, if you play this for your friends, expect to be an outcast.  Why?  Because your average Joe is not educated in music and falls for a bunch of tricks, but there are no tricks on Quantum, just music at its finest.  Going to a Planet X show is like attending a church where music quality is first and foremost.   Yes, there is far more to this album than chops, as though their needs to be some skill to play chops, Quantum also has a complexity, such that a rest in the music says just as much as a note.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

*** Marley and Me by John Grogan; performed by Johnny Heller; audiobook – An Escape to Regularity


Introduction:
I am probably not the best person to be reviewing fiction.  I hope that changes.  Generally, I prefer rigorous non-fiction books.  Usually fiction and stories do not have the ability to hold my attention.  Maybe that means I shouldn’t be reviewing this.  However, I have found at least a few books about dogs captivating, such as Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Where the Red Fern Grows.  I understand that these intellectual traits probably make me in the minority of people.  However, I desire to get into pop fiction.  To me pop fiction probably presents a way for me to get into something I like.
Usually, people start with what is normal and popular, and then sometimes move onto something more obscure.  For example, few people ever start out listening to jazz.  Most of the time people start out with popular music, especially if they come from a family that does not regularly listen to something more sophisticated like jazz.  For me, music has been a journey, going back to when I didn’t have a clue.  There once was a time when I listened to Naughty By Nature, but then I moved on to Aerosmith and the Steven Miller Band, only to move onto Megadeth and Metallica.  To be sure, some people’s tastes never evolve past being childlike.  By my senior year of high school, I was playing jazz, but I had yet to find what I really liked in the music.  So, for me there was gradual progression toward more sophisticated music, because at the heart of my soul, I am an intellectual.  Most people aren’t.  In fact, most people don’t like intellectuals, just look at where I stand on my review account at www.amazon .com.  Sometimes I wonder if I am ranked dead last at www.amazon.com.
As a general rule, I am not a dog person.  I have read that women are generally attracted to men that like dogs, especially the kind that they might meet taking a dog for a walk.  I love cats.  I haven’t had a dog since I was a child, and at that it wasn’t my dog.  So my experience with a dog that I can relate is with a blackish grey animal that my parents had named, “Pooh.”  I have always been uncertain if it was my mom that named the dog that because the color of his fur reminded her of feces.  Mom would never admit to doing something like that.  It is just that I have suspicions of her that she likes to do things like that.
So, a cat is to me, what a dog is to the narrator.  Cats love me.  Cats visit me.  Sometimes cats groom me.  Cats sometimes wag their tail when I pet them.  Cats are known to sleep next to me.  Often, cats come when I call them.  Cats talk with me.  It is as if I am able to have a conversation with a cat, exchanging meows of endearment.  I even had a cat that seemed to want to protect me.  Shiloh, my cat, was very friendly with me, but with my wife, he would take a swing at her seemingly attempting to protect me.  If I met a feral cat that lived off the local land, I wouldn’t be surprised if that cat would let me pet him.  Once, I got a pet a lion.  It has long been my desire to have a pet lion, but I know that it can never be.  Lions by nature groom people that they like.  It is as a habit for a cat to groom another cat, or a person they like, and well if a cat as big as a lion ever licked me, it would probably take my skin right off because of the way cats’ tongues are constructed.  As some people would have it, the goal of man is to do things like reconstruct the cat through breeding, such that it is optimized.  I don’t like that.  I like cats as they are.  And, it is thus such that I will almost certainly never be able to have a full size lion because lion’s don’t make good pets.  However, I have my cats, and I love to encourage them to be as wild as possible.  I would never have a male cat castrated.
As far as non-fiction is concerned, I would say that I am far from a rookie, but when it comes to literature stories, I don’t really have much experience.  I hardly ever watch television.  The truth is, I haven’t watched television regularly since 9th grade of high school, and by the time I got to my Freshman year of college, I was hardly ever at the movie theater.  Now I am in my mid-thirties  and there is a part of me that calls, saying, “You really can’t be a holistic person with a comprehensive approach to life unless you have some knowledge of the popular fiction stories of the day.”  I have tried to get into several fiction books.  My wife reads them regularly, but I seem to always read a few pages only to get more bored with each successive page.  In fact, she has read Marley and Me.
Having read a few other dog books and seen a few other dog movies, it occurred to me that maybe I could find a window back into the world of stories other than those in the Bible.  It occurred to me that I would be unable to get through a fiction book even though we had this one.  Yet, when I was browsing through books at the local library I saw this one.  I picked it up, and thought, “Maybe there hope for me to become interested in stories again.”
Review:
The more realistic the story, generally the better I like it.  Okay!  I admit that there are exceptions, such as Star Wars.  There is nothing fantastic about this work, and that is one probably the greatest reasons why I have been able to sit through the whole thing.  The other reason is that it is an audio book.  After finishing the first cd, I decided that I would have put this one down if I was to read it as a book.  However, the narrator assisted me, not slowing down and tiring out, such that I could put it down, but I didn’t.  Even if at times, I was getting bored, the narrator would read on where I would have put down the book.
I am a man on a mission.  I would like to enjoy fiction again.  I enjoyed fiction when I was a child, before the age of 18 that is, but then it became boring to me.  The narrator assisted me.  When it got boring, I all I had to do was let the cd continue to run, and hope for more interesting sections.
The book was written in the first person.  It is from the point of the dog’s owner, who is in fact very different from me, at first.  In judgment of him, I thought his character was pathetic.  What kind of man castrates?  So, in my opinion, I saw it as sweet justice when he was no longer able to get an erection.  It is no wonder that Gd brought him a miscarriage instead of a baby.  His thoughts were rather small, and his language simple and trite.  However, I was able to like this book because I could imagine many people relating to this man.
In short, he was an average Joe.  He didn’t speak above anyone.  This is a book I imagine most literate children would be able to read.  In my case, that is a plus, as when it comes to enjoying fiction, I am out of practice.  Comparing the narrator to myself, this book provided what I thought a good fiction book should provide, a believable reality escape, possessing the qualities of reality, especially a different reality than that which I am familiar with.
By disc 2, I was starting to enjoying the story.  I appreciated the story of the failed pregnancy.  These were sections of stories that I related to.  However, I felt like I had a steak pulled out from my teeth when I found out how short this section was.  Clearly, this wasn’t a man that deserved to have a baby, such that when Gd brought him a miscarriage it was much to my enjoyment, and it furthered the view I was gaining of him as a common and despicable man that this miscarriage seemed to be practically inconsequential.  He was but a half a man, and the bitter facts of his reality, such that his dog was less than desirable, seem to all be according to the way I would expect that Gd would have a relationship with someone like him, a life full of mishaps that seemingly come from a chaotic rather than an ordered reality.  By the end of disc 2, I was getting bored again.
So if you have gotten this far in the reading of my review, and have been able to hold your desire to smite me, the most common way people relate to me, you might wonder what my criteria are for even giving a book a starred review.  In this case, I deemed prior to listening that if I actually got through the book, I would give it 3 stars.  That being said, this one made it, although I do admit, just when it seems to be getting good, it gets boring, and just when it seems to be really boring, something catches my ear that seems interesting, gaining my attention.  Sometimes it seems like I detect a hint of annoyance in the readers voice, which seemingly comes from nowhere, but is quite humorous.  It is as if he is saying through his teeth, “I am reading this because I have to, and I am full of hate, and wish I could be doing something better.”  Sometimes, he seems like he is gaining in enthusiasm with the rhythms of his delivery.  It is hard to speculate about the unpredictable nature of the author’s delivery.  Sometimes it seems as if he is a saint.  Sometimes it seems as if he is half a man.  Sometimes it seems as if he is hell bent on creating another smutty book, full of the vulgarity that would entertain a naughty child in the same way that morons try to gain attention through shocking words like, “Vagina, blood, and young girl, dying, and innuendos like potluck (conjuring images of people smoking marijuana),” and phrases like, “A teenage girl in a blood soaked blouse.”  3 stars!
Perhaps, the greatest aspect of this book and its subtle use of smut is that it will interest junior high school boys in girls in reading, such that they skip over the boring parts and head straight for the junk.  By disc 4 the content is really cookin’ up a crime, and is hardly anymore a story about a man and his dog, but a story about the author’s affinity for young women.  I have said before that in my opinion most young adults from the ages of 14yrs to 21yrs just want to be bad.  Sometimes this is referred to as teen angst.  This is only natural.  My own personal opinion is that it is okay to share some smut with youngsters, especially if it interests them in something positive like learning to read, or the arts, but I had to wonder if he considered his target audience to be that of 12yr old girls with the hope that they would fall in love with him.  That is I believe in the same way that there is practically no such thing as music that is totally bad, there is hardly an example of a book that causes people to read that has no redeeming qualities.  Then, after he exhausts the id of the teeny-boppers, he returns more adult material on disc 5.
Marley and Me is not a book for people that love dogs in the truest sense in my opinion.  This is a book for people that love domestic dogs.  It is not until chapter 20 that I hear the true call of the wild in Marley and Me.
When I see the dogs that are for commonly for sale, even at discount prices, I see these dogs as perversely morphed freak animals.  They aren’t right though I do believe we should love them just the same.  Through strange breeding methods they have been morphed into freakish looking animals that would almost certainly die if forced to live in the wild.  Marley is not a wild dog.  Marley is but a misbehaved dog, but he is an animal nonetheless and worthy of love.  I guess that is the point.
When I see a dog that catches my soul, it is usually at the zoo, an animal deemed not fit to be a pet.  I have seen wild dogs not at the zoo, ones that could have possibly attacked me and killed me, and that is the way a dog should be.  Dogs eat meat, and they don’t just eat it, they guzzle it.  A dog is the type of animal domesticated people feel a certain amount fear of.  The type of dog that I personally espouse would probably eat a child, or even me if a pack of them were given a chance.  Thus, Marley and Me is no Dances with Wolves, referring to the movie with Kevin Costner.
When I think of a dog, it is bittersweet to think of the domesticated dog.  When I see a domesticated dog, what comes to my mind is the pimp and hooker relationship, as the dog is merely a device for men and women to meet each other buy.  Thus, in this case, the John, defined as a person who buys a hooker, is really intended to be a woman.  These are young men, and as John Grogan starts out as a hooker of a man, through his relationship with Marley, it seems as the pages go by Marley brings out the best in him.  I like wolves, and for that reason, and I have to admit, Marley and Me never really stood a chance to win my highest praise for that reason.  Marley was not a wolf, and he just couldn’t be one.
Men are not naturally tamers.  It is women that seem to be the man tamers, well maybe.  It is around women and babies that most men’s testosterone levels fall.  I can’t claim to understand the psychology of women.  Is it that they like it this way.  Women do not seem to gravitate toward tame men, if they have the ability to choose.  So, is the purpose of woman to tame a man, as it seems to happen always?  I think it is not.  Why?  Because I believe in the words of the Bible, where Gd says to Adam when He creates Eve, “I will make a helper suitable for you.”  Thus, in my view, a wife is a helper.  In Hebrew, Eve and woman are synonyms.  If you aren’t honest with yourself, as a man, you will end up domesticated, but if you love your wife and are honest with her, then she will help you find within your soul the man that you can be, wild, and yet possessing attributes such as loving-kindness.  It is thus such that women either grow a man into a beast, or they turn them into children.  Thus, I believe women are designed for men to assist them become who they really are, bringing men to philosophical agreement through ideas such as, “Do unto others as you will have them do unto you.”  In this case, for the author, his dog is his helper.
Lastly, the ending of this book is too long, and too drawn out.  If I could tell the author anything it would be, “Get to the point and finish it,” but instead he tries to use every possible trite emotional hook in the book.  He should just come out and say, “I want you to cry for me, and I’m going to do my damnedest to do make you do it.”  If I were a youngster, I would have fallen for these hooks, and they would have tugged at my heart.  However, my end feeling was that the author got annoying in his attempt to pull a tear jerker using all the tricks of stories already written.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Review: CAB by Tony MacAlpine, Bunny Brunnel, and Dennis Chambers – Contemporary Jazz at Its Best.


Definitely a five out of five possible stars album.  This is contemporary jazz, and it is in my opinion the most competitive of all genres.  In the genre of contemporary jazz, you have to be a virtuoso to get recognized, and yet in my opinion it has some of the best music out there.  Don’t expect to find friends through this music.  And, don’t expect that listening to this music will make you popular in any way.  If you listen to contemporary jazz, you are into it because you appreciate the highest quality sophistication.  Lol!  And, Phil from Pantera thought that his music was underground.  Pantera is as big as Michael Jackson was when he released Thriller compared to CAB.  If you want to rebel by forsaking popularity, and favoring good music, CAB is an excellent choice.
There once was a time when jazz was popular, and flourishing.  That was back in the time of Miles Davis, or was it?  Personally, I like this album better than anything I have heard by Miles though I might be biased as a guitar player myself, and well Tony MacAlpine is one of the best guitarists out there.  Jazz evolved from the time Miles played it.  However, it essentially went underground after fusing with rock n’ roll.  Though this album isn’t swingin’, there isn’t a hint of usually talent deprived genre of rock n’ roll on this album though it might be considered to be the genre of fusion.  If you played this album for virtually anyone who thinks rock n’ roll is the best kind of music going, they will probably ask you to shut CAB off, or at least turn down the volume.  How uncool!
Some people just don’t get sophisticated music and that is a shame.  These are the same people that wouldn’t listen to a  rock band of chimps or people with Down’s Syndrome, by preference.  Why?  Because it would be impossible for a bunch of chimps to make music worth listening to by anyone’s standard.  So really, the philosophy of the people that like simple rock n’ roll unravels because every has their own idea of how simple it can get before it is no longer enjoyable.  As far as I am concerned, it is only human to like sophisticated music.  Why?  Because  of what makes a human a human from the biological perspective, and a big part of that is having a large intelligent brain compared to other species.  Yes, in case you didn’t know, the size of any brain is correlated to intelligence.  So, why some people fight this and choose dumb music over sophisticated music is beyond me.  Sure, I admit, I like the occasional contemporary pop or punk album, but it is not primarily what I prefer to listen to.  I prefer to listen to music rich in complexity and sophistication.  CAB fits the bill!    

Sunday, May 13, 2012

I am not any of the following Craig Hamiltons.


  1. Interesting. Who is Sylvia.

    The Spirit of Sylvia: Who is Craig Hamilton?
    sylviasilk.com/2011/06/14/who-is-craig-hamilton.aspx
    sylviasilk.com
    Here's a post I thought you'd like.
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  2. Activity
    Recent
  3. I am not this Craig Hamilton.


    Craig Hamilton | Facebook
    www.facebook.com/craighamilton1
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  4. I am not this Craig Hamilton.


    Craig Hamilton - Mental Health Advocate, Keynote Speaker ...
    www.craig-hamilton.com/
    www.craig-hamilton.com
    Craig Hamilton is an Australian radio sports broadcaster suffering from Bipolar Disorder. Best selling author of Broken Open, a Mental Health Advocate & keynote speaker.
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  5. I am not this Craig Hamilton.


    Craig Hamilton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Hamilton
    en.wikipedia.org
    Craig Peter Hamilton (born Dumfries 1 September 1979) is a Scottish internationalist rugby union player. His position is lock and currently he plays at club level for Edinburgh Rugby.
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  6. I am not this Craig Hamilton.


    Craig Hamilton | Free Music, Tour Dates, Photos, Videos
    www.myspace.com/djcraighamilton
    Craig Hamilton
    Musician/Band
    Myspace
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  7. I am not this Craig Hamilton.

    Comic Art Gallery of Craig Hamilton at ComicArtFans.com
    www.comicartfans.com/gallerydetail.asp?gcat=6069

    www.comicartfans.com
    The Original Comic Art displayed in this Free Comic Art Gallery is owned by Craig Hamilton. A Comic Art Collection at ComicArtFans.com.
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  8. I am not this Craig Hamilton.


    The Art of Craig Hamilton | Facebook
    www.facebook.com/pages/The-Art...Craig-Hamilton/26473729287
    Craig Hamilton was born on December 29, 1964 in Macon, Georgia. He was raised there by a “fabulous, beautiful mother,” Josie Kitchens. At age 12 Craig began private art study with award-winning designer and master portraitist, Houser Smith. Weekly classes continued for seven years until Craig gradua...
    Page: 978 like this
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  9. I am not this Craig Hamilton.


    Craig Hamilton: Integral Enlightenment | Thank God For Evolution
    thankgodforevolution.com/node/1940
    thankgodforevolution.com
    “Michael Dowd has written a book that is at once fun to read and a significant contribution, from which people of all faiths can learn. ”
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