Good lord, that last post was completely wrong. It just shows how primitive my worldview has become. It's more likely just a projection of my own mental state in the guise of sophomoric philosophilosizing.

If one must consider people's motivations for doing what they do, they're no doubt countless. While being simplistic, where is "Because I enjoy it" or "Because the sum benefits of it outweigh the inconveniences and annoyances and even the tragedies" in my thinking?

That said, it also re-affirms the feeling of dissipation of the relevance of my existence. These are just idiotic thoughts I have for most part now.

Looks like after 10 years, this year is the year I've posted the least. Kinda makes sense. Not sure what else there is to say. But it's not like there's nothing left to say. I'm still a thinking, breathing, metabolizing entity. I'm not dead yet. On some levels at least.

At the same time I feel my existence, or the relevance of my existence dissipating. Both. There's no point in saying anything. And there is no point in saying anything. But as long as I'm still here, might as well say whatever there is left, right?

I still go about my days. And they're not bereft of meaning worth communicating, although I might doubt the value of what I might communicate.

A ten year old blog, well, well, well.

Obviously there are likely things I posted through the years that I'd be embarrassed about now or might need to qualify or even consider outright wrong. Or not. I can't think of anything offhand that I think I was completely wrong about. Whatever.

Wrap things up? I don't know.

Maybe for starters, for the past two years at least, I've been doing basically the same thing every day. And every day I go out, I look at the people and I wonder "why are they doing what they are doing?", I try to imagine what their motivation is.

Oftentimes I imagine the answer is "because it's their programming". What they do is what they're programmed to do, and they're just running the program. Another possibly more condescending answer is "they don't know why and they don't ask, they don't know what else there is". Another answer is "*belch* why not?".

I'm not satisfied with any of these answers, except maybe the last. I've said this before, but I don't know why people do what they do, nor why I should adopt their motivation to do something, anything.

Life of Pi (Taiwan, 2012)

I have to say it straight out. Having just read the book recently and now seeing the film, the film is better than the book. I can't really fault the book, though, because the nature of the novel lends itself perfectly for a visual experience through film.

Many things described in the book require more imagination than I have to visualize them just reading the book. In the film, I don't have to put that effort into it and I can realize what the author was trying to describe.

It's hardly an action movie, but there is visceral motion in the story that Ang Lee makes the audience feel that couldn't be conveyed in just words in a novel, I thought. And Ang Lee's digital teams' visuals are absolutely stunning.

Finally, as I mentioned, in the book a character mentions it's a story that will "make you believe in God", and I didn't think the book delivered on that. The movie does. Perhaps not in a literal sense, but in a conceptual sense.

There's that big, albeit subtle, turn-around scene when it's like, "oh, that's what he means. Yea". I'm scientifically oriented at heart, and a running theme of this blog is to keep that orientation in check. Science is amazing in how it describes reality, but it is only amazing because it limits itself so strictly.

It doesn't investigate what it can't find evidence for. Scientific reality I accept. But I also accept a reality that science can't touch. And the question is, do you prefer a reality that is only scientifically describable, or a reality that has elements that science can't describe?

It is an intense film. I wouldn't preclude reading the book for all the detail that is fleshed out, although a lot of the stuff left out in the film was definitely not necessary in the film. I can't say if my appreciation is greater having read the book, and of course at this point I can't watch the film not having read the book.

I think I'm going to give this film 10 out of 10 tomatoes. 9 at the lowest.



Skyfall (2012, UK)

Oh, good grief, it's a James Bond film. Either you like James Bond films or you don't. They all have flaws or are hard-boiled or whatever.

Daniel Craig continues with the hard, gritty, no-nonsense James Bond that you're not necessarily supposed to like. And the franchise now is part of the 21st century action film genre where if you deliver big bangs for the buck, you've succeeded.

And that's what this film is. A visual amusement park ride of an action movie. It's hardly high cinema, has a lot of flaws, but it's a James Bond film. Nominal fresh 7 out of 10 tomatoes. It's no where near a total fail, but leaves a little to be desired.

I've read a bunch of rock autobiographies lately. I mentioned Ozzy's about a year ago. These autobiographies are like reading history for me; people who have contributed to the music background of my life and hearing their perspective in kind of their own voice. Aside from Ozzy, I've read Keith Richards' "Life", Sting's "Broken Music" and I'm currently reading Steven Tyler's "Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?".

Keith's book renewed interest in the Rolling Stones for me. I was fine with the Rolling Stones until the Tattoo You album, after which I think I felt the Stones lost their relevance and I thereafter didn't pay attention to them even when critics were reporting a "return to form" after the 80s ended. Growing up, I liked all the Stones repertoire played on radio and I bought a bunch of LPs from the 70s and wasn't blown away. A lot of filler on the albums, I thought. Looking back I probably just bought the wrong albums.

If you buy a band's great albums, you can then accept their lesser output. But if you buy their so-so albums first, you don't get the momentum to discover their best albums. So I bought Goats Head Soup, It's Only Rock and Roll, Some Girls, Love You Live and of course Tattoo you and Emotional Rescue which were released when I was old enough to be buying albums. I didn't buy Exiles on Main Street, Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed or Sticky Fingers. Anyone familiar with the Rolling Stones catalog can probably look at that list and see I missed the great, classic albums and understand why I failed to appreciate them through the rot of their 80s output, a period characterized by public feuding between Mick and Keith. Privately, they rarely even recorded in the studio at the same time, if ever.

It's no literary masterpiece. Actually, it's a total mess with the timeline scattered and many stories and anecdotes placed haphazardly out of context, but that's not the point. What makes it a great read is that it's Keith Fucking Richards, and if real rock and roll or the Rolling Stones are anywhere in your background, it's kind of a must-read. The thing is over 600 pages and if I end up back in the States, I'll probably buy it and read it again with their musical catalog cued up for when relevant songs and albums come up.

I didn't expect much from Sting's autobiography and I wasn't disappointed. The Police are legendary, but I was never impressed by Sting's personality or arrogance. I gave it to him that he was a brilliant songwriter, one of the great pioneer rock bassists who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Paul McCartney, and I credited him to be of above average intelligence.

I expected the book to be pretentious and full of himself. It was written after he was only 50 years old and no where near the end of his career nor when he was old enough to have the reflection or levity to be some definitive life statement. But the most surprising aspect of his book was how poorly written it was and the shocking use of high school-grade metaphor.

I think he even (pretentiously) admits that he was trying to be a writer, drawing on his own life as the source material for a literary work. And it's for most part, really, really boring. I figured out too late that most of the first half of the book should be mercilessly skimmed and ignored. Inconsequential anecdotes from some random person's early life (not unlike this blog, but I'm neither famous nor getting paid for this pure vanity project).

The only interesting part of the book for me is when he talks about the formation and early days of the Police and that back story, and that takes up a good part of the book, and then the story suddenly ends with the U.S. tour of Outlandos d'Amour, their first album. The bulk of the Police years are not mentioned, which indicates he had nothing to add to what had already been plumbed through the media through the years.

That book is the worst of the bunch for me, but I'm not a Sting fan. Just as he once emphasized, after an interviewer referred to "Police songs", that they weren't Police songs but his songs played by the Police, I'm a Police fan, not a Sting fan.

The only thing that made an impression on me was the idea that he is not a happy person. Fame and fortune hasn't brought him happiness and he admits that at the center of his being is an unhappy person that was probably formed in his early life. It doesn't change just by superficial success. If the inconsequential anecdotes of his early life are of any worth, I'd glean that his lifelong unhappiness was caused, perhaps innocently, by his parents, as well as modern, post-war life and economies. As a person, I also appreciate that certain depth to him and can hardly fault him that.

Steven Tyler's autobiography is easily the best and most entertaining of the bunch. Unlike Keith's book, it sounds like Tyler's voice, whereas if you hear Keith talk, the book sounds like nothing what would come out of his mouth. He doesn't talk as coherently as the voice in the book, and the book isn't all that coherent. 

But befitting the primary driving creative force of Aerosmith, Tyler is also a great writer and communicator of his ideas. He's funny and candid, doesn't hide his pubescent boy sense of humor that only a rock star is allowed to carry on the rest of his life, and tells it like it was, the good, the bad and the horny.

I'm not a huge Aerosmith fan. I liked their hits, thought a lot of their albums were filler, and like the Stones I ignored them after the 80s rot settled in with guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford leaving the band for a few years. Unlike the Stones, I did notice when they came back with distinctive and worthy hits, but like the Stones I also considered them irrelevant in my youthful perspective, compared to new music that was coming out (alt rock which led to 90s rock and indie rock).

I was moved by Richards's book and I am being moved by Tyler's. Although Richards' perhaps more so because of the span of the legend of the Rolling Stones. There's a joie de vivre in a rampant, decadent rock and roll life, one that I may have dreamed about as a teenager; one that in retrospect I would never have wanted nor been able to handle. But I recognized that spark of what drives you when that spark is music. I guess I didn't want it enough. I didn't work hard enough at it. And though music remains the last love of my life now, inexplicably in superficial, corporate manufactured K-pop, I'm glad I have the bedrock of appreciation of something real.

Steven Tyler, on the other hand, I'm appreciating him as a human being. Someone down-to-earth, passionate and honest with himself, even regarding all his faults in his rock and roll past and lifestyle. I don't know how to explain it. He is a spiritual person and is in contact with the unseen life energy that gives our world meaning. Not enlightened in the sense of transcending it in recognition of a completely different "reality", he is still very much in contact with the perceptual world, but he sees the channel, the bridge.

He comes across to me as an exceptional human being.