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I don’t watch a lot of television, but whenever I catch the beginning of Law & Order, even if I’m in the other room, I can’t help but finish the episode.
The one I caught today, Episode 406 from Season 18 (”Angelgrove”) reminded me an awful lot of Jesus Camp. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the most common theist arguments is the Argument from Design (or the Teleological Argument). I’ve discussed it before, but here’s a quick recap:
The world exhibits elements of design, therefore it must be designed, therefore it must have a designer.
The most basic refutation to this is that if there was a designer, he/she/it would also exhibit elements of design and would, by the same logic, be in dire need of a designer.
John Varley’s 1981 book Wizard takes an interesting approach to the issue.
I’m not the kind of guy who falls for those super-obvious identity theft scams. I live online, I work in IT and I don’t really like sports. I’m pretty careful when it comes plugging my credit card into the internet.
But last month, when I was stuck for rail tickets in Europe, I thought I’d slipped up. Turns out, it was just a “security feature.” Read the rest of this entry »
This Sunday’s post is late, and short. But if you missed my post earlier this week, A Response to College Christian, you should check it out and join in on the ongoing commentary.
Mario Kart Wii dropped rather quietly a few weeks ago, in the shadow of GTA 4. I hadn’t been hearing much about it, positive or negative, so I wasn’t clamoring to grab a copy. When I finally got around to giving it a go this weekend, the experience was underwhelming. Really? It’s been 5 years since Double Dash and this is all you’ve got for me?
Unfortunately, I’m studying for a Jewish-Christians relations exam tomorrow, which means that I don’t have much time to dedicate to my regular Sunday blog update.
But just so I don’t break my Sunday post promise, here is an excellent picture I found while reading the news this morning. Read the rest of this entry »
So it’s been just over a week since TorrentFreak announced that Demonoid was back from the dead. A lot of us former users have probably received the announcement email by now. At first, there was a lot of concern that it might be a trap. And why not? When I first heard the news, I was certainly skeptical. The mysterious reemergence of one of the world’s most embattled torrent trackers, under a new admin? Seems a little too good to be true…
But after spending some time looking into it, I’m not worried any more. And here’s why you don’t need to be, either… Read the rest of this entry »
This afternoon I watched For the Bible Tells Me So, a documentary about religion and homosexuality. The film didn’t have any atheists, secular humanists, naturalists, post modernists, or any of the usual critics of Christian fundamentalism. Instead, the interviewees were all Jews and Christians, speaking from religious perspectives and largely conservative backgrounds.
For a moment, I’ll stop playing the role of vitriolic atheist and say that if all theists behaved the way that many of the theologians in the film did, then I probably wouldn’t even be writing a blog about atheism. I doubt I’d suddenly start believing in the super natural, but the passion with which I oppose such belief would certainly flag. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not sure I quite understand this poster, but they’re up and down Granville Street today. I’ve noticed similar advertisements at one time or another in the last few months, one of them a sandwich board with a guitar player rocking out, presumably for the lord.
This type of aggressive, testosterone fueled ministry is becoming increasingly popular - and seductive. I remember being in highschool and attending a few Pentecostal youth groups: doing super fun stuff, always totally free. Unfortunately, before and after there was always the requisite babbling in tongues and sobbing in ecstasy. I always felt a little bit left out, but hey, free bowling was free bowling. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t have much of a sweet-tooth, so it took until this afternoon for me to crack open this Easter’s Kinder Surprise Egg. The prizes in those things are always a little bit what-the-fuck, but none of them can hold a candle to the sublime weirdness of VALVO-SAN, the great wise man of the east.
The description that came with Valvo-San says it best, so I encourage you to read it for yourself. Read the rest of this entry »
So The Bay in downtown Vancouver has an interesting advertising campaign right now. At first I thought they just hadn’t noticed the implications of placing about 90 constantly running low-energy lightbulbs in a window display urging us to be “more green.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Guitar Hero story that was making the rounds last week was certainly funny, but it’s also a good jumping-off point to talk about that perpetually exciting topic, intellectual property law.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with the story, the gist of it is that Gibson is suing Activision (who publishes Guitar Hero) for infringing on a patent that supposedly protects “simulating a musical performance.“
The fact that a patent like this was ever even granted is ridiculous. What’s next, a patent for “a method of operating muscles in such a way that air is taken into the lungs and oxygenates the blood“? Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not a graphic designer. In fact, I don’t have an aesthetically talented bone in my body. This being said, I really don’t like Arial. Yes, Arial. You know, the font that you see pretty much everywhere - the only one besides Times New Roman anyone ever considers using. Read the rest of this entry »
“Nerdcore hiphop” sounds like a bit of an oxymoron — and maybe it is. It’s the fusion of geek humour and hiphop (usually gangster rap). Last night, when nerdcore virtuoso MC Chris was opening for Pinback at Richards on Richards, he seemed pretty aware of this.
It’s an odd genre: nerdcore has a relatively dedicated fanbase, but they’re a pretty disparate group. Outside of the shows at PAX, I wasn’t sure that nerdcore rappers ever actually performed. Who would go? They’ve actually created a niche more underground than traditionally underground hiphop. Without the nebulous non-spatiality of the internet, I wasn’t convinced that nerdcore rappers could gin up enough fans for a concert. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the second in a two part series on my recent decision to stop eating meat. This has been going on for about 9 months.
So here’s the twist: I don’t think that animals have a worth equal to humans. I don’t even think there is anything inherently wrong in eating animals. The crux of my argument is that the unnecessary production of suffering is where the ethical problem lies.
In a hypothetical world where animals were raised and slaughtered in humane and painless manner, I don’t see any ethical problem with eating meat. There are other problems, of course: the production of meat, even in its current cost-cutting and suffering-inducing state, is not economical. The amount of energy expended to raise food animals doesn’t get recouped by the value of eating the edible bits. The humane production of meat probably isn’t going to be more cost effective. But that’s a different argument.
This is the first in a two part series on my recent decision to stop eating meat. This has been going on for about 9 months.
“Cognitive Dissonance” is a Psychology term that refers to the unpleasant mental state of holding two conflicting ideas. Essentially, the mind will perform amazing rhetorical backflips in order to ease this type of conflict.
The concept itself isn’t new, but I started thinking about it in relation to vegetarianism/veganism after listening to a Definitely Not the Opera podcast in which Carol Tavris was interviewed about her new book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).
What does cognitive dissonance have to do with vegetarianism? Well, I think it was an encounter with cognitive dissonance that fueled my rather abrupt decision to stop eating meat.
I watched the series premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and I took notes on it…
- Great, John Connor’s annoying. “Why me? I can’t lead an army. Why is this happening again?” Sheesh.
- Ah, the new Terminator sent to protect him is a hot (allegedly) 15 year old girl. There’s actually a scene where she sits in front of a camp fire totally topless and seems surprised when Sarah makes a “You might want to put those back in the holster” joke. Something tells me that this a wet dream for more nerds than we know.
- There’s some weird sexual tension between Cameron (the new Terminator) and John. It’s partly weird because they’re supposed to be 15, but partly weird because she’s a robot.
- When they were filling up at the gas station, Cameron kind of implied that she had emotions… Which is laying the groundwork for some love that dare not speak its name…
- What’s with robots from the future wearing leather?
- There was full frontal nudity! Shadowy, grainy, but full frontal nonetheless!
- And now the hot (allegedly) 15 year old girl is naked, kicking the asses of 3 stereotypical “Aw-yeah-baby” type thugs.
Summary?
The best part of the Terminator time-travel mythos is that people have to end up naked when they travel through time. I’ve added “allegedly” to my references to the 15 year old girl, because she’s played by Summer Glau, who is 26. That’s older than me. And the best part is that even though there was only one time travel scene, Fox still managed to include 3 seperate scenes with nudity.
I don’t know if it’s my bias towards time-travel based sci-fi, or if it was actually a half decent show… But in regards to The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I remain cautiously optimistic.
To people that aren’t English students, the idea that language actually creates ideas rather than simply conveys them can seem a little strange. But this is exactly what language does.
Take these two examples:
- Fundamentalist Christians are attempting to inject religious propaganda into science classrooms by teaching the baseless notion of Creationism alongside the scientifically supported Theory of Evolution by natural selection.
- Evolutionists are attempting to silence some scientists that are raising questions about Darwinism and Evolution by Natural Selection. These scientists are suggesting that the Theory of Intelligent Design may be able to account for life on Earth just as well as the Theory of Evolution.
Both passages convey similar information, but in addition, they both create information.
LATEST UPDATE (April 2008): People are still arriving here through Google, but this news is out of date. Demonoid is currently up and available, even for Canadian users. For more information about Demonoid’s return and why I think it’s safe, read this post.
UPDATE: Demonoid is, of course, back online for everybody except Canadian users. If you live in Canada, use www.proxy.org for now. I’ll write about my thoughts on the matter later.
Currently (September 25, 7:36pm) Demonoid is still down.
UPDATE:
It is now the morning of September 26 (7:52am) and I checked two major National dailies (the Globe and Mail and the National Post). Neither report anything on Demonoid, making it increasingly unlikely that the downtime has been caused by legal action. While the general public may not be interested in such a story, it doesn’t make sense that the CRIA wouldn’t be claiming victory.
Here’s what’s going on:
- The site is down, but pings still return. This could mean that the site has been firewalled by the ISP, OR it could be temporary network issues.
- TorrentFreak posted a story claiming that the CRIA pressured Demonoid’s Canadian ISP to firewall the site… However, their source is listed as Nu.dl. When I used a translator to read this page, it didn’t quote any confirming sources.
- The Circuit Box has this to say about the CRIA: “Just for the record, the CRIA (despite the name) does NOT represent Canadian artists and the Canadian music industry. It is an AMERICAN association based in Canada to represent the RIAA here.” However, http://www.cria.ca/about.php lists the CRIA as indeed representing Canadian recording artists, and claims to have been formed in 1964 (since before file sharing became a “problem”).
- Neither the CRIA, nor any Canadian media so far have reported anything about Demonoid. (Compare this to the almost immediate claim-of-responsibility from BREIN last time this happened in the Netherlands).
- Operators in the Demonoid IRC channel on P2P-NET deny that they have any information about the downtime. The MOTD reads “SITE IS TEMP OFFLINE” and it’s being bombarded with users asking why. The Circuit Box has posted a transcript of a chat between the TorrentFreak author and a Demonoid staff member, in which the Demonoid staffer claims that the TorrentFreak source was unreliable and denies that the site has been threatened with legal action.
- The sole administrator of Demonoid appears to be someone named Deimos, who ha s yet to appear to make any sort of official statement either in the IRC channel or in response to news articles.
- One previous reader claimed that his friend who works for the US Department of Defense told him that the Israeli government hacked Demonoid. Just thought I’d mention it.
EDIT:
From Casey: “Deimos is not only the sole Administraotr, he is also the owner/creator/overlall god of Demonoid.com.”
Last I tried, (September 24, 12:46pm), I couldn’t access Demonoid.
I get the classic “couldn’t establish a connection” error page.
But when I ping demonoid.com, I don’t seem to have any problems.
I was having problems last night, and I just noticed this morning that the only torrents I have that are getting activity are on other trackers. Has Demonoid fallen prey to a malicious attack, or are they just having plain-old server troubles?
Anyone have info?
UPDATE:
anonymous1: “The CRIAA shut it down”
- This is unconfirmed, but interesting nonetheless.
anonymous2: “the AIPAC and the israeli government hacked their site and shut demonoid down.”
- This doesn’t make any sense… Why would the Israeli government be angry at one of many file sharing websites, especially one that focuses on North American media?
Richard Dawkins recently appeared on The Enright Files, (a CBC Radio program), along with his mirror-world counterpart, Father Richard Neuhaus. The episode is available as an MP3, here. (Apparently CBC only archives their shows for 4 weeks. If it’s no longer there, I’d be happy to send it to anyone that asks.)
The Dawkins portion of the interview didn’t contain much new material if you’ve read The God Delusion or The Blind Watchmaker, or seen any of his numerous lectures on YouTube, or his made-for-TV documentary.
However, when Michael Enright asked whether it was not possible, within the realm of speculation (not probability!), that our brains have not evolved enough to encompass the idea of a creator, Dawkins had this to say…
In 1921 Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics. Since then, his work has continued to hold a priveleged place in the realm of science. In 1999, TIME Magazine named him “Person of the Century.”
By all accounts, Einstein was a bright fellow. And like all bright fellows, it feels nice to have him on your team. When you believe the same things that smart people believe, you can claim intelligence by proxy.
Which is why it’s not surprising that theists have claimed Einsteinian support for their particular brand of belief. The most common argument is that Einstein believed in the Abrahamic God. In an impressively acrobatic series of logical contortions, some people use Einstein’s words to support specifically Christian doctrine.
The Vancouver Sun, Tuesday, July 31, 207 [page A7]:
WASHINGTON - The U.S. House of Representatives Monday called on Japan to apologize for forcing thousands of women into sexual servitude to its soldiers during and before the Second World War.
Great. Now if only the U.S. would apologize for continuing with socioeconomic policies that force thousands of women into the sex trade today, for subsistence reasons.
I found this article ["God does not want 16 kids" by Mark Morford] on Digg and loved it. The writing was fast paced and clever, and the author clearly had a nice sense of irony, however obvious it was.
To sum up the article for you: There’s this family, right? And they’ve got 16 kids. Not like 16 adopted kids, or 16 foster kids, not even 16 kids-if-you-count-the-kids’-kids-and-their-kids. This is a family where one woman has declared the borders to her uterus permanently open and then out marched 16 new human beings. The article focused on the fact that breeding 16 kids in a single 2 parent family is flat out irresponsible - on all levels.
This is an excellent video. As much as it smacks of Michael Mooreism, it’s fascinating to watch college Republicans go through such tortured logic to explain why they are not, at this very moment, serving with the American armed forces that they so adore.
My favourite is the 100% Definitely Not Gay fellow with inclinations. If something even bigger happens, he assures us that he’ll be right there in Iraq. Presumably, still being very Not Gay.
Unfortunately for everyone, creator Max Blumenthal loses points for protest music, a melodramatic whisper and staging a disruptive Interpretive Dance scene. Just setting a camera on the table and listening in to the mindless prattle of these tools would have been enough to drive the point home. The self-conscious sensationalism and artificed martyrdom weakens the stance.
R.I.P. Jerry Falwell: your unfailing moral compass will be sorely missed in the war against tolerance, compassion and rationality.
Unfortunately, Falwell’s departure from the realm of the living is only a drop in the big bucket of progress that is required to save the world from itself. Falwell was merely endemic of a larger problem: the rising tide of fundamentalism.
When I tell people that I oppose all forms of religion, no matter how moderate, I’m always faced with the question: “What does it matter to you what people believe, if it’s not hurting anyone?”
Well, like the Rev. Falwell and his ilk, I too believe in slippery slopes — except that I’m not talking about homosexuality and bestiality. I believe that the continued existence of moderate religion validates the emergence and growth of extremist sects. But that’s another post altogether…
In any case, lest we forget Falwell’s Good Christian Values, I will record some of his divine pearls of wisdom for generations to come, thus ensuring that we do not remember the Rev. Falwell as anything but the hateful bigot he was.
Jerry Falwell…
…on diversity:
“When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
…on the enemy within:
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
…on the the value of hard work:
“Labor unions should study and read the Bible instead of asking for more money.”
…on compassion and tolerance:
“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
…on success:
“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”
…on the separation of Church and State:
“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”
… on gender equality:
“It appears that America’s anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men’s movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening.”
If we look at the universe as a sum total of positive and negative forces… Well, the universe got its holiday bonus early this year. Happy holidays, universe.
Quotes from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_falwell
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/foulwell.htm (C) Cliff Walker
Thanks the tireless efforts of Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, atheists no longer have a leg to stand on when they show up with their pesky science and rational thought. The crocoduck? Flawless argument! Point: theists.Unfortunately for Cameron, his rather lackluster rebuttal of evolution has already been done. And even more unfortunately, thanks to the wonders of scientific method, lots of people haven’t had any trouble seeing through the holes.
The “Argument from Design”(or the Teleological Argument for God’s Existence) is old hat. William Paley came up with that one years ago. 207 years ago, in fact. Essentially, Paley says that we can prove God’s existence by the fact that we (humans) are too complex to have happened “accidentally”. If we see a watch in the field, we know it was designed by someone because it is too complex to have just formed by coincidence. Humans, in turn are so complex that we were obviously designed, ergo, there must be a designer, ergo, God is the designer, ergo, God exists. Ta da!
There are a lot of problems with this argument, and well written refutations can be found in excess on the internet… And in most first-year philosophy classes.
The key problems are as follows:
- Even if we concede that complex objects must have more complex designers (watches must have been created by humans, humans must have been created by something more complex, etc.) this line of thought simply turns into an argumentum ad infinitum. For, if all complex things need a creator, who created God? There is no logic in the argument that validates exempting God from the argument from design. Argumenta ad inifinita don’t prove anything, they’re just rhetorical tricks.
- The ultimate designer is simply assumed to be God. The classic refutation of the argument from design is Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker. There is no logic in Paley’s (or Kirk Cameron’s) argument that would lead us to believe that if a designer exists, it must be a sentient, personal God. Dawkins successfully argues that the examples of perfect and specific design commonly used for the argument from design, (e.g. the human eye, or bat echo-location faculties), were, in fact, designed. A strange stance for an internationally reviled atheist. However, he contends that the forces of natural selection and evolution were the designers. These forces, like gravity or friction, are not agents: they just are. Gravity doesn’t have an intention when it sucks you down to earth, nor does natural selection have an intention when it weeds out undesirable genes. Highly complex and specialized objects cannot not exist, for if they didn’t fulfill a desirable function perfectly, natural selection would have prevented the genes from passing on.
- And finally, the argument from design, even without the first two problems, could only possibly prove the existence of a God, not the God. However, the most vocal theists that have glommed onto this idea are Christians. More specifically, fundamentalist Christians. The argument doesn’t go, “… ergo, God created humans, the Christian God exists.” Once again, no logic in any version of the argument from design proves the existence of the Christian god. The argument from design could perhaps be used to make a case that humans were designed by aliens, who were designed by talking dogs, who were designed by… Wait, I see where this is going.
As a side note, Bill O’Reilly is really quite a tool. The “No Spin Zone” routinely leaves me so dizzy that I can barely stand.
I’m working on consolidating my views on music and the internet, but in the mean time I thought that I might post:
Two things you’d do well to avoid.
Life After God by Douglas Coupland
I know I’m a little late on this train, considering that Life After God was released in 1994, but I just picked it up from the used-book section of a second hand store and struggled through it. Such struggle, I think, merits a response of some type.
Coupland’s writing is generally rather heavy-handed, but Life After God takes the cake as far as self-aware, overly dramatic writing goes. This book, coupled with Coupland’s pseudo-cult status, may well be responsible in part for the plague of self-dramatizing and superficially introspective blog posts that torture the internet today.
The idea is intriguing — Coupland asserts that “you” (which, I guess is me) are the first generation to grow up without religion. In the grungy 90s, this may well have looked like the future: life without God. But (unfortunately for us) this rings less true today, with the advancing twin blades of evangelism and fundamentalism. Coupland seems to push the idea that spirituality is a necessary force in dealing with the materialistic culture we live in. As a non-spiritual person that has no issues coping with and contesting a materialistic society, I must respectfully disagree with him.
Coupland’s deconstructionist insistence throughout isn’t darkly entertaining like it was in Generation X, and the tropes of fractured text and doodle interludes wear thin quickly. Perhaps it wasn’t as cliche in 1994, but today the book reads like the postmodernist literary endeavour of an arrogant third year Arts student.
If someone reccomends Coupland to you, start with the more traditionally narrative Microserfs or Girlfriend in a Coma. If you’re hell-bent on the post modern, check out Generation X. But for the love of God, stay away from Life After God.
Idlewild
Normally I wouldn’t review a movie without finishing it, but I’m going to make an exception for Idlewild. The movie was rather universally panned, but then again, so are some other great movies. Being fan of both the old skool of Outkast and the newer Speakerboxxx/Love Below era, I was prepared to give it a try. It doesn’t hurt that I find the 1920s-30s South aesthetically quite attractive, either.
There were some really stylish dance scenes, where traditional swing was mixed heavily with hip-hop and pop-and-lock. The cartoon quality of the cinematography was nice, but ultimately not interesting enough to save the movie from a slow, boring story line.
Soon after it began, the movie took on the trappings of a hyper masculine hustler drama, where men make big important deals and women take their tops off. The tortured romance between Angel and Percy is really the only counterexample, but it’s traditional, predictable and boring. Though movies can perhaps be excused for falling into tired old paradigms like that, there really wasn’t anything else strong enough to compensate for it.
Final verdict: it didn’t make me think, laugh or flinch. By most movie standards, it failed quite spectacularly. And the music wasn’t even that good. Shame on you Outkast.
I thought I was done for the day, but I just caught a news story that forced me to don my cape and goggles once again. Jack Thompson, career video game violence alarmist, is in the media spotlight once again. This time, responding to the Virginia Tech tragedy.
In the actual video clip, there are two things that strike me as bizarre. First, Thompson pronounces “ad infinitum” as “odd infinitum.” Second, he repeatedly says that school shooters “train” on violent video games. While I’m more than ready to concede that school shooters, (indeed, probably a lot of violent people), play violent video games, the idea that they can train using these games is ridiculous. Having played a lot of violent video games, and being quite good at many of them, I can tell you that they did not help at all when I shot a rifle at a firing range for the first time.I think that the “violent video game debate” is over-hyped and misunderstood. There’s a bit of straw-man arguing occuring. Your run-of-the-mill adult gamer supports rating systems and restricted sales. When a game is rated “M,” it should only be sold to Mature individuals. When Grand Theft Auto gets into the hands of a 12 year old, it’s not Rockstar’s fault — it’s the fault of the retailers, and more so, of the parents.Additionally, your run-of-the-mill adult gamer openly admits that violent people, often enough, play violent video games.
The fact that violent people play violent video games is about as shocking as the fact that violent people also watch violent movies, or read violent comic books. But we should always remember: correlation does not prove causation. Need I bring up the infamous pirates vs. global warming graph?
Violent video games are not the root cause of school shootings, or even of violence generally. In fact, they probably aren’t even an auxiliary cause. What they may be is a symptom. Not everyone with a mole has cancer, and not everyone with a cough has bronchitis. I feel very confident in predicting that were violent video games ultimately banned, (however that might happen), school shootings would not stop.
These people weren’t seduced by the violent world of video games, they had issues beforehand. In fact, as Kotaku reports (citing an FBI study on school shootings), psychological assessments of the shooters reveal that they were more interested in the images of violence, not the gameplay. i.e., as far as video games go, they were more interested in seeing an image of murder than in actively committing the act of murder. Without video games, these people would have just watched more violent movies, read more violent books, and fantasized more violent fantasies. To single out video games would be unfair.
Most school shooters played violent video games, which makes the games an easy target. If we just got rid of the games, all this nasty school shooting business would stop, right? But most school shooters were also mercilessly bullied, teased and ostracized. Most school shooters had extreme depression or untreated schizophrenia. The underlying social problems are the ones that we need to address, not the existence of violent video games.
Oh, and America, this is a question for you: Why is it so goddamned easy to buy a gun down there?
Matty and I attended the Regina Spektor concert last night at the Commodore. Whenever bands play at bars, the bars have this awful habit of making you stand around for absolutely forever before any music actually happens. I guess this is to make you bored and encourage you to buy $6.25 beers. The Commodore is one of the worst venues for this, so even though we arrived an hour after doors opened, the opening act still didn’t start for at least another 45 minutes.Speaking of which, the opener was a solo-acoustic act from New York, going by the name Only Son. He plays a predictable brand of spacey-indie rock and he has an enormous Artist’s Ego. He closed out his set by reading bad poetry and making fun of MySpace — right before giving his MySpace address.
So after another hour or so, Regina Spektor actually got on stage. When she’s speaking, she has a cute, shy voice. When she’s singing, it’s nigh on impossible to distinguish it from an album track. I’d always kind of figured that her voice was synthesized at least a bit on the album, but she did her entire show by herself on piano and guitar, and it was quite amazing…. And she sang Après Moi, in which she does a verse in Russian. I find that part inexplicably alluring.My assessment of the concert? Overall, a B+, but had it followed a more reasonable timeline, (and perhaps if Only Son hadn’t recited poetry), it would’ve come in as an A quite easily.
“All the non-believers, they get to eat dirt, and the believers get to spit on their graves…”
From “Baby Jesus” by Regina Spektor
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