What's good?

Chinese photographer Lui Bolin self portraits
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my favourite!
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According to the Washington Post, this was one of the best videos of 2009: United Breaks Guitars.

It illustrates the advice I always give to struggling young musicians who are looking for a way to get noticed without playing record-company-roulette. Make a really entertaining video and post it on YouTube. People will discover it and tell their friends. It doesn't even have to be slick, I've seen lots of amateur videos on the YouTube hot list.

It also illustrates the perils of flying United.;) Unfortunately United is the only airline that comes to my town so I don't have a choice. I have checked two guitars and a keyboard and they all survived, although I was not pleased to see them toss my vintage Martin down the slide onto the baggage carousel.
 
I am often annoyed by styles and fashion, especially when they differ from the usual just to be different.
Thus, I find (define) beauty in the old rule:

“Form follows function; Beauty follows form.”

I also do not think something is “good” just because that is the common opinion, especially if has recently become the common opinion. Thus I tried to formulate a new rule for “good” along the lines of the old rule for beauty:

"Satisfaction follows utility; Good follows satisfaction."

Perhaps someone can do better at simple definition of “good”?

I definitely do not like to be told what is “good,” especially if the foundation for their something being “good” is highly arbitrary as it is grounded in culture and / or religion.
 
Billy T said:
Perhaps someone can do better at simple definition of “good”?
Click to expand...
I think you'll have to come over to the Linguistics board for that.;) But in this discussion, on this board, I think what we're all taking it to mean is simply:
  • I liked this and I think you might like it too.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao&feature=player_embedded

My wife sent me this. It's is the sweetest story I've seen in a long time. It's about the meaning of the word "Validated." And you Americans will appreciate the part about the DMV. (The Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency in each State responsible for issuing driver's licenses and registering vehicles. Most Americans consider going there worse than a colonoscopy and the experiences are remarkably similar.)

I'm going to bookmark it because I just know there will be days when I need it.
 
Anis Mojgani

Anis Mojgani is brilliant;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNarjOIUiu4

Here I Am by Anis Mojgani

We all wanted that high school sweetheart
We wanted to be young and white in the 50s with meatloaves and sock hops and lawns,
Lawns so perfect they looked like Clark Gable was kissing them
We wanted to be thirteen and alive and meet a girl that was thirteen and alive
And walk with her past the grandstands, to sit and hold hands, to sit and kiss, to sit and sit,
Like it was something you would miss, but that never was

We all wanted to be poor, but not too poor
Connecting this country like Kerouac and Thumbs
Pulling waitresses into backseats and trailer park homes
Where the two of you would find passions expanding between the locking of your bones
Until the morning would come to find the two of you out on the road with your pockets empty except for your hands
Your hands would be full and overflowing with your soul
But that's not what happened

We once went to bed like between the bed sheets was a valley with dinosaurs still breathing
And how we capture these triceratops?
And brontosauruses?
But even they were opened up with the smoke that rose out of the homes and the corners that we once climbed through,
The streets and the footballs which we once threw,
The school desks upon which we once drew,
The windows that sat open through we once flew,
Before the outside world of parking spaces and dead friends came flooding on in
And we forgot what we wanted
And we became what we become:

Waitresses and bartenders, city employees and temp positions,
We are junkies and one kiss poems and we cry the stars
As we write our scars onto dumpsters and electric boxes
Because the only thing that we can hear is our hearts
And the only ones listening are the streets
That the blood that breaths through the letters we leave
And we dream to rise ourselves up out of these burning buildings
But instead we get buried somewhere beneath

Because I know my life is like some high school kids notebook
A high school kid that shuffles back and forth between school and home
Stacking the letters and the pictures too close for anyone outside of his own Imagination to read
Because it's through the ink that his heart beats,
That his heart breaths
And we all just wanted to write these notes

Check if you like me
Check if you don’t
Check if you'll date me
Check if you won't

Because we all wanted the love songs to be true
And we did love dinosaurs once
And we wanted the stars to hold our hands,
To lick the teeth to fuck us,
But they ended up fucking us,
So let your smile twist
Like my heart dancing precariously on the edge of my fingertips,
Staining them like that same high school kid licking his thoughts,
Using his sharpie tip writing:

"I was here
I was here mothafucka
And ain't none of y'all can write that in the spot that I just wrote it in
I’m here mothafucka and we all here mothafucka and we all mothafuckas, mothafucka
Because every breath I give brings me a second closer to the day that my mother may die
Because every breath I take takes me a second further from the
moment she caught my father's eye
Because every word I carry is another stone to put into place in the foundation that I'm building
Because the days can erase something that I never saw
What all of us wanted and what none of us got
What we all had and have and what we all forgot
That we all wanted to be something
That we all became something
And it might not be the shit we once though we'd be when we
were kids but something is still something
and like some cats say, something is better than nothing
Feet are smarter than an engine
And dreams are stronger than thighs
And questions are the only answers we need to know that we are alive
as I am when I have the mind of a child,
asking why is 2 + 3 always equal to 5 ?
Where do people go to when they die?
What made the beauty of the moon?
And the beauty of the sea?
Did that beauty made you?
Did that beauty make me?
Will that make me something?
Will I be something?
Am I something?”

And the answer comes:

already am, always was, and I still have time to be



More of his work;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbYmRaPirnY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znIXyFh6dsI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wye_axUPRrU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFWiNNUfpC4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r46MpFKJ8A
 
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My 12 yr old daughter is having one of her landscapes displayed at KIA. We haven't seen it yet, but we will when it goes on display.
More than a bit proud...and shocked.
 
I took a break from the internet to get some stuff done around the house. The work itself isn't good, but the results are.

I also bought a new truck. It's a GMC Sierra Crew Cab with a Duramax Diesel and Allison 6-speed automatic transmission. That's definitely good. :cool:

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