Monday, January 12, 2009

Gladwell, Obama, Mark (bet you never thought you'd see your name beside BO did you Mark?), Jaydiohead, Movies, and Paul Shirley is a hipster.

  • An interesting take on Obama's cabinet and how playing pick-up basketball will inform who he chooses. I'm not sure its totally bang on, but fun to think about, since, I'm pretty sure the kind of "character" things they talk about when they mention basketball can be applied to just about any other team sport... except maybe baseball.
  • Ummm... someone may want to tell Jaydiohead that mash-ups are so 2005... except its still kind of cool. For my money the best mash-up album has to be God's Stepson the 2003 mix of Nas' God's Son by 9th Wonder... except that isn't really a mash-up at all is it... huh...
  • Since I had three weeks off (that's right... woot woot) I got a chance to see a bunch of movies: Milk which was an excellent bio pic of the first elected openly gay official in the USA, but it was disturbing seeing Sean Penn use some of the mannerisms as when he played the retarded guy in I Am Sam; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was basically a more fantasy oriented/less campy version of Forest Gump, told backwards, with - I think - better acting; Religulous ...while I am completely on-side with Bill Maher (in that I have no idea what to believe about God) it was really unsatisfying to see him take shots at religious people for 90 mins; Frost/Nixon which I had no idea was a Hollywood movie going in (I thought it was a documentary), but was really impressed with that guy's portrayal of Nixon... well worth seeing.
  • Also, Paul Shirley - NBA/Euroleauge/Basketball Vagabond/Writer/ESPN Columnist-Blogger - apparently reads Pitchfork, or, I imagine that he does based on his 'ear candy' '08... god... I'm such a snob.

4 comments:

Question Mark said...

I just hope Obama's pick-up games leads to Allen Iverson as Secretary of Commerce.

"Man, we talking about commerce. Commerce, man! Not a game, not a game...commerce!"

Allan said...

I guess you have to see Slumdog Millionaire now?

Milk was alright, it was good not great. Another writer was telling me how Harvey Milk, while gay was still a bigot - I don't know any truth to that but it's unlikely someone was uniformly good.

The R.O.B. said...

.... either Iverson OR Ron Artest and JO as secret service agents (possibly with their own reality TV show)...

Slumdog, the Wrestler, are two that I'm really interested in seeing - and I'm nervous, but kind of interested in seeing Notorious also... although I think its going to glam Biggie's life up and lionize(sp?) him a little...

... just crossing my fingers that they'll both show up at Empress Walk (11 bucks for popcorn, drink, ticket if you show a student card)

Unknown said...

Hi Rob,

I have to do a blog for my course and I decided that the subject would be Canadian bands. Very original. I've put a link to your blog, but if you want to check it out it's http://blog.pressebook.fr/lescanadienschantent and it's in French.

Happy writing.