Local entertainer and MC, Clownvis, recently appeared on “America’s Got Talent” and served the judges, in my opinion, a much needed ribbing.  They didn’t let Clownvis sing any Elvis songs because of copyright issues, and really the crowd didn’t give him a chance to get into his act before they started booing because they are an empty minded, shallow, impatient bunch of haters.  Really, I hate this show, and I loved Clownvis taking on the pompous, overly worshiped judges with a frank bit of deflating humor.

Really, who is that British guy?  Seriously?  No one I know knows who he is.  “His worst nightmare”?  What?  You’re nothing, buddy, and your show is another redundant bit of clap trap.  Huzzah and hooray for Clownvis for showing the emperor has no clothes.

picture from nytimes.com

The Flaming Lips frontman, Wayne Coyne, had a house/music studio built for him in the midst of the crack-addled neighborhood he grew up in.  Actually, he bought a several buildings he calls “The Compound”.  Trying to help revitalize the neighborhood in a bizarre gentrification scheme (I suspect his goal is to change each crack-house into an acid-house one by one).

picture from fitzsimmons architects

Living here, he says, gives him freedom. “You can do what you want — when we rehearse, nobody ever complains about the noise.”

- from nytimes.com

picture from fitzsimmons architects

…the living situation has been difficult at times, especially with the area’s high crime rate. “If we hadn’t been able to expand” and create a buffer zone, Mr. Coyne said, “we’d have been in trouble.” Seven years ago, they purchased the home that belonged to their next-door neighbors and demolished it; the three other houses and two other lots have since expanded their property to about two acres.

- from nytimes.com

from fitzsimmons-arch.com

Personally, my favorite part of this whole house is the bathroom, which looks like something from a David Lynch movie.

picture from fitzsimmons-arch.com

Yeah, if I won the lottery and got millions of dollars I could see myself buying a bunch of buildings in St. Louis and making something like this in South City.  Or maybe just buy a tall building in Downtown West and put a weird cafe at the bottom of it.  Well, I guess money can’t buy you happiness, but it can add a lot of variety to your life, like missing a dinner date because you got lost in your own shower.

On NPR I heard them talk about the Taqwacore movement, which is a genre of Islamic punk and hip-hop music.  Pretty interesting stuff.

Here is the NPR article.

Rolling Stones has an article here.

This is an fun little video for song “Candy Girl” by the band Soviet.  Not the highest production, best acting, or even that great of a song, but I really liked this video for some reason.

And here is yet another way to get free music and skirt copyright laws: stereomood.com.  It’s actually a pretty nice site, allowing you to browse music and playlists based upon tags and “moods”.  The music seems to come through with pretty good quality and reliability,  at least with a broad band connection.

Heath Ledger allegedly was taking a large amount of drugs and sleeping at most two hours a night while preparing to play the Joker. When I heard about his death I immediately thought about those rumors.

Now Mary-Kate Olsen tried to claim immunity from prosecution for information about Heath’s death, which makes me think that perhaps she was being picked to play the role of HarleyQuinn and they were both practicing the roles together when he died from a drug overdose.

The DEA was trying to pressure Mary-Kate about where she got the drugs, but now no longer needs to state anything. But still, it makes me wonder who she was protecting, perhaps Nolan himself? Was it Nolan ordering Ledger and Olsen to take massive amounts of drugs, not sleep, and play mad-house together?

Olsen certainly has a look that would work as HarleyQuinn, but I don’t know if she really has the acting skill to pull it off. Still, it would have been interesting to see Heath and Mary-Kate together on the screen acting out the script of Mad Love, with Nolan’s gritty, dirty Gotham as the backdrop, perhaps showing the Nihilistic joker show brief scattered moments of actual love and attachment to Harley.

BTW, it is especially funny for the Joker to be saying, “May the floss be with you”, in this episode because Mark Hamill provides the homicidal clown’s voice.

More specifically, the music of Bear McCreary, a man who has composed the majority of the music for Battlestar Galactaca and may soon have a character based off of him as the Final Cylon (rumor).

Here is some of his work for BSG:

This music is first played as Gaius Balter hallucinates himself in the Kobol Opera House, making out with the “virutal” Six in his head, discovering his destiny as the “chosen one”, the father of the new race of human/cylon hybrids, all while Commander Adama is shot and bleeding by the cylon infiltrator (number 8), Sharon Valeri and all seems bleak and hopeless for the remains of the human race.

This next piece, the “Song of Baltar”, is what is played as the background for the interior of the cylon basestars, perhaps reflecting the alienation and sense of separation Baltar feels as becoming fully despised and rejected by the majority of humanity, finding no refuse besides the torturous and genocidal whims of the cylons, whom he slightly suspects he is one.

And of course is the anachronistic “All Along the Watchtower” which awakens four of the “Final Five” from their slumber and into awakening as cylons. It is a little hackneyed, but none the less a powerful piece of music properly relaying both the horror and excitement of the awakening sleeper cylon agents as they discover their true identities.

I recently watched the earlier episodes of BSG and have to say that the decision to make Galen and Tigh cylon sleeper agents definitely enhances those episodes, as it makes many of the past statements and challenges so ironic in the light of the fourth season.

What happened to Earth? Who is the “Virtual Six”? If you take a look at the last season of the original series then it can be explained by humanity evolving to a point by which they are able to exist as pure mentata, pure mental energy. All the Lords or Kobol are just people who long ago shed their physical bodies and became beings of light, and I imagine that “Baltar’s River World” is a part of this spiritual realm that humanity escaped into (and by spiritual I mean “unexplained scientific discoveries”).