See it on Amazon
So this book is really short and easy to read so I figured I would get through it in a week end and sure enough I did.
The book is less than 200 pages so you could probably finish it in one lengthy sitting or two medium ones.
The first half is quite interesting and gripping. We get a view into Frank's upbringing and his early family life, and he is brutally honest about it.
He recounts a life in which he was obviously very traumatized and troubled. I could not put the book down during this first half.
The second half is where it gets sort of murky. He vaguely describes how he got into the coffee business and how he founded second cup, some of the passages in this part are okay, we sort of get a feel for how he build his business, although most of the innovations were due to blind luck, or so it appears.
Then he sells his half of the company to his business partner Tom, after which the book loses focus almost entirely. The first half had us looking closely at this intimate portrayal of a man's life, then we back up by about 50 feet to see his business, then we back up even further and the structure of the second half falls apart rather drearily.
He jams a random chapter in his book about his wife, a random chapter in the book about kids in africa who have aids (I get it but what does this really matter in the context of his life?)
The book felt rushed, unfocused and uneven, and the great tragedies that befell him as a child, he did not in any meaningful way explain how those experiences helped him to become the man he would eventually become, and further did not go into enough detail as to how he overcame his alcoholism and his depression.
Nor did he explain how he was able to be intimate again after all the sexual abuse he endured as a young teen.
Its filled with holes and overall an unsatisfying experience, but has its moments.
3/5.
Sunday 12 November 2017
Monday 30 October 2017
Propaganda and the Mind
You out there reading this blog, if indeed anyone is, you're the real thing.
You are the living breathing embodiment or the human condition.
That was 41 years ago. Everything in the film industry has gone downhill. Less interesting, less meat on the bones, dumber language, simpler plots, less aspiration.
Shit, basically shit.
We are living in a dark age, the dark age has come. It has come, we are living in it. There is no point in lamenting the eventual decline, we are amidst it.
The only hope is that humanity has accelerated such that the dark ages instead of lasting hundreds of years, may only last a couple of decades.
The idea is that with the ever increasing advanced of technology, everything else would advance at a corresponding increasing rate.
In other words, the recent events of Trump, Brexit and the meltdown of the mainstream media (which Beale laments above) is happening faster than anyone could have imagined.
And Bitcoin is surging, I blinked and it went for 3K to 6K, and it could be 20 K by next year.
And fiat currency, well its as stagnant as ever.
Things are moving fast, real fast. Its gotten to the point that we could potentially anticipate all of mainstream media being totally replaced by independent media within the next 5-10 years. A complete reversal from the early 90's when big conglomerates bought up every news and radio station in the world.
I'm reminded of a quote from Princess Leia in star wars, the more you tighten your fist, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
The powers that be are losing the information war, ,they can no longer peddle their truth as they once did. Once the consequences of this hits their wallets or their desires to manipulate world events enough, they will hit back, with what I wonder...
You are the living breathing embodiment or the human condition.
That was 41 years ago. Everything in the film industry has gone downhill. Less interesting, less meat on the bones, dumber language, simpler plots, less aspiration.
Shit, basically shit.
We are living in a dark age, the dark age has come. It has come, we are living in it. There is no point in lamenting the eventual decline, we are amidst it.
The only hope is that humanity has accelerated such that the dark ages instead of lasting hundreds of years, may only last a couple of decades.
The idea is that with the ever increasing advanced of technology, everything else would advance at a corresponding increasing rate.
In other words, the recent events of Trump, Brexit and the meltdown of the mainstream media (which Beale laments above) is happening faster than anyone could have imagined.
And Bitcoin is surging, I blinked and it went for 3K to 6K, and it could be 20 K by next year.
And fiat currency, well its as stagnant as ever.
Things are moving fast, real fast. Its gotten to the point that we could potentially anticipate all of mainstream media being totally replaced by independent media within the next 5-10 years. A complete reversal from the early 90's when big conglomerates bought up every news and radio station in the world.
I'm reminded of a quote from Princess Leia in star wars, the more you tighten your fist, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
The powers that be are losing the information war, ,they can no longer peddle their truth as they once did. Once the consequences of this hits their wallets or their desires to manipulate world events enough, they will hit back, with what I wonder...
Sunday 25 June 2017
Alien Covenant, a review
In my last article, I concluded by saying "What is the point of watching something if you know the outcome?".
The other day I watched Alien: Covenant, and saw about two thirds of the film then abruptly left the theater, fighting off disgust and disdain for the shit show I was watching.
If you haven't seen it and plan to, spoilers ahead. If you haven't and don't plan to, then this won't change your mind either way.
The premise of the film is in essence a soft reboot of the original Alien. An android sabotages a crew in order to make an alien that is reminiscent of an H.R. Giger monstrosity.
What's interesting to note, is that if you haven't seen Alien before, but are half way intelligent, you'll still probably be bored by the film.
I went ahead and saw the original Alien again recently to make a comparison, and what I noticed was that Ian Holm's character in the original, Ash, was extremely subtle about his betrayal. We only discover it when Ripley hacks the computer logs near the end of the film to discover the original purpose of their mission.
What made that plot interesting was the Company's deliberate evil, they were willing to spare the lives of the crew in order to get a living specimen on board.
This time around it appears to be a total accident that they decide to visit this Alien planet, some weird transmission from Prometheus's Dr. Shaw is caught in Danny McBride's helmet (makes no friggin' sense at all) and they decide to take a massive risk and visit this rogue planet.
No bio-hazard suits, no protective gear, no precautions of any kind, they just land and this mysterious black ooze quickly causes two aliens to hatch and the chaos begins.
I must admit, the visuals are stunning, and are blindingly real. What the film lacks is any form of tension and anticipation whatsoever. This is compounded by the fact that the character of David is so obviously a traitor from the get go, the way his eyes gloss over when they mention that they have 2,000 human beings in space pods is laughable.
What is further laughable is the script and the reactions of the crew. Every single action can be deconstructed as totally nonsensical, but for the sake of brevity I will only demonstrate two such examples. (For a silly breakdown of more nonsense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmwyWerz5KI)
Firstly, Crudup and McBrides wives carry an obviously sick human back to their drop ship, his skin is off color, hes puking out massive amounts of blood and if he does have a viral infection, than they are all contaminated at this point as he has vomited large quantities of blood onto one of the women and coughed heavily in their general direction. Airborne viruses move quickly.
And yet, minutes later, when it is a simple matter of opening the door and letting the woman through because she is stuck in the room with the man who is minutes from having an alien pop out, McBride's wife decides to let her die because she is afraid of contagion, which no doubt has already spread. Then she decides to open the door any fucking way to shoot the alien but slips on the blood fucks up and dies horribly.
The film is about as cerebral and subtle as a deliberate kick in the balls, which is very strange to say about a Ridley Scott Alien film.
The second example of stupendous idiocy is the scene where David and Crudup's character (pardon but the characters are so forgettable I can't remember their names) stumble upon an alien who has just brutally murdered one of the women in the crew. Crudup does the sensible thing and kills the beast, and David chastises him aggressively claiming that he was building trust with the animal and how could you be so cruel...about an alien that has indiscriminately murdered several of the crew.
Then David brings Crudup into a room filled with creepy experiments, descends into an even creepier basement filled with the classic Alien eggs. Crudup's character is either mentally retarded or has no capacity for rational thought, as he does not suspect David at all, nor does he find the large disgusting eggs creepy, and idiotically listens to David when he says to him "Go ahead and take a close look, its perfectly harmless".
See the script is a hastily written piece of shit by a novice, which is why the characters don't make any sense. Who in their right mind would stick their head near that alien egg, AFTER it opens its flaps? After being led down by a creepy android who is clearly a few screws loose? Not an ounce of suspicion or agency on the part of the character, that would require depth and thinking.
As an audience member who knows with exact precision what is about to happen, you just kind of sit there and wonder what the fuck these people were thinking when they made this piece of shit movie.
I repeat my previous article's statement, What is the point of watching something when you already know the outcome?
Maybe this film was hastily made just to make a buck, I don't know what the point is anymore, whatever happened to genuine inspiration and infusing actual passion into your work?
Fassbender aside (he may be predictable, but he's still somewhat entertaining to watch), there is no reason whatsoever to watch this film, which is why I didn't finish it.
Avoid at all costs.
The other day I watched Alien: Covenant, and saw about two thirds of the film then abruptly left the theater, fighting off disgust and disdain for the shit show I was watching.
If you haven't seen it and plan to, spoilers ahead. If you haven't and don't plan to, then this won't change your mind either way.
The premise of the film is in essence a soft reboot of the original Alien. An android sabotages a crew in order to make an alien that is reminiscent of an H.R. Giger monstrosity.
What's interesting to note, is that if you haven't seen Alien before, but are half way intelligent, you'll still probably be bored by the film.
I went ahead and saw the original Alien again recently to make a comparison, and what I noticed was that Ian Holm's character in the original, Ash, was extremely subtle about his betrayal. We only discover it when Ripley hacks the computer logs near the end of the film to discover the original purpose of their mission.
What made that plot interesting was the Company's deliberate evil, they were willing to spare the lives of the crew in order to get a living specimen on board.
This time around it appears to be a total accident that they decide to visit this Alien planet, some weird transmission from Prometheus's Dr. Shaw is caught in Danny McBride's helmet (makes no friggin' sense at all) and they decide to take a massive risk and visit this rogue planet.
No bio-hazard suits, no protective gear, no precautions of any kind, they just land and this mysterious black ooze quickly causes two aliens to hatch and the chaos begins.
I must admit, the visuals are stunning, and are blindingly real. What the film lacks is any form of tension and anticipation whatsoever. This is compounded by the fact that the character of David is so obviously a traitor from the get go, the way his eyes gloss over when they mention that they have 2,000 human beings in space pods is laughable.
What is further laughable is the script and the reactions of the crew. Every single action can be deconstructed as totally nonsensical, but for the sake of brevity I will only demonstrate two such examples. (For a silly breakdown of more nonsense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmwyWerz5KI)
Firstly, Crudup and McBrides wives carry an obviously sick human back to their drop ship, his skin is off color, hes puking out massive amounts of blood and if he does have a viral infection, than they are all contaminated at this point as he has vomited large quantities of blood onto one of the women and coughed heavily in their general direction. Airborne viruses move quickly.
And yet, minutes later, when it is a simple matter of opening the door and letting the woman through because she is stuck in the room with the man who is minutes from having an alien pop out, McBride's wife decides to let her die because she is afraid of contagion, which no doubt has already spread. Then she decides to open the door any fucking way to shoot the alien but slips on the blood fucks up and dies horribly.
The film is about as cerebral and subtle as a deliberate kick in the balls, which is very strange to say about a Ridley Scott Alien film.
The second example of stupendous idiocy is the scene where David and Crudup's character (pardon but the characters are so forgettable I can't remember their names) stumble upon an alien who has just brutally murdered one of the women in the crew. Crudup does the sensible thing and kills the beast, and David chastises him aggressively claiming that he was building trust with the animal and how could you be so cruel...about an alien that has indiscriminately murdered several of the crew.
Then David brings Crudup into a room filled with creepy experiments, descends into an even creepier basement filled with the classic Alien eggs. Crudup's character is either mentally retarded or has no capacity for rational thought, as he does not suspect David at all, nor does he find the large disgusting eggs creepy, and idiotically listens to David when he says to him "Go ahead and take a close look, its perfectly harmless".
See the script is a hastily written piece of shit by a novice, which is why the characters don't make any sense. Who in their right mind would stick their head near that alien egg, AFTER it opens its flaps? After being led down by a creepy android who is clearly a few screws loose? Not an ounce of suspicion or agency on the part of the character, that would require depth and thinking.
As an audience member who knows with exact precision what is about to happen, you just kind of sit there and wonder what the fuck these people were thinking when they made this piece of shit movie.
I repeat my previous article's statement, What is the point of watching something when you already know the outcome?
Maybe this film was hastily made just to make a buck, I don't know what the point is anymore, whatever happened to genuine inspiration and infusing actual passion into your work?
Fassbender aside (he may be predictable, but he's still somewhat entertaining to watch), there is no reason whatsoever to watch this film, which is why I didn't finish it.
Avoid at all costs.
How the NBA finals are symptomatic of our cultural divorce from reality
So the finals are now over.
The Cavs played very well in games 3, 4 and 5 and still lost, because they had to expend TONS of energy to compete with the MUCH MORE TALENTED Warriors team.
That's right, Kyrie Irving, Bron, KLove and a solid bench got beat.
You can debate the particulars of the series if you want to, maybe Kyrie expended way too much energy with all the flash, maybe Bron and KLove didn't assert themselves enough offensively, maybe Korver just missed a few open 3's he would normally make.
The macro is this:
What Kevin Durant did in the off season is symptomatic of our culture. He took the easy way out, he didn't care about the means, he only cared about the ends.
Our culture is only concerned with appearances, hence our obsession with social media, hence the rise in narcissism.
People do not seem to realize the sheer oddity of a player of Durant's caliber deciding to join a 73 win team that basically was already the best team in the league by a sizable margin. Especially since his team was up 3-1 and had he and Westbrook figured out how to play a decent 48 minutes they would have met Cleveland in the finals.
Now the Warriors are about to sweep the field, and it happened because a player was allowed to tip the balance of power in an extremely lopsided manner.
The fact is that this has never happened before. LeBron went to average or lottery teams and made them contenders, he didn't JOIN a contender to make them a super contender. He still wanted to show that HE was a major part of the reason that his team made it to the top of the mountain, he relishes the JOURNEY.
Durant just wants the outcome. Its like a dude who can't lose his virginity so he hires a hooker. All that matters to him is busting a nut, not a meaningful connection.
We no longer seem to be interested as a culture in an authentic meaningful experience, we just want the outcome that we imagine will make us happy. Our instant gratification culture has bled into major sports now, with this move being defended and glossed over as okay and justified with various precedents.
I am reminded of when I was a teenager and we would go to my cousin's house to play Risk. He would always win, which seemed odd at the time. Years later he admitted to us that he always stacked the deck so that he would always have more soldiers than we did.
The NBA is now a sport where the team with the best shooters wins, by virtue of the fact that officiating is skewed towards the offensive player. When the game is less physical it becomes purely a matter of offensive ability. The Warriors, already having the best offense in the league were allowed to add the best offensive player not on their team onto their team.
And now the anticlimactic result of the Warriors winning has happened, and they will of course win again next year, barring a major choke job or a major injury. They will have home court and will be damn near impossible to beat in a best of seven series.
The Cavs will retool and arm themselves up even further so that they can compete, cementing a fourth straight finals appearance of the same two teams. What a snooze fest.
The reason people are touting around as to why Durant made this move is that supposedly players are only measured by whether they won a championship and by how many they have won and so he did what made 'sense' to cement his legacy...
In essence what they are admitting is that our culture has become so shallow and transparent that we only care about the end result, not the journey, not the details.
We only care about cliff notes, not actually reading the book.
We judge people based on meaningless numbers, not the details.
We read our news in bite size chunks because we lack the patience for meaningful content.
Our news articles contain fewer and fewer facts and more conjecture and propaganda.
Championships are the measure of greatness, not actual skill or impact. It matters not that this was a cakewalk, what matters is the outcome.
I myself have no desire to watch the NBA anymore, no parity, no post play, all threes and layups, every team is adopting the same style of play. The league is becoming homogeneous and what makes matters worse is that the officiating is as terrible as its ever been.
What is the point of watching something if you know the outcome?
The Cavs played very well in games 3, 4 and 5 and still lost, because they had to expend TONS of energy to compete with the MUCH MORE TALENTED Warriors team.
That's right, Kyrie Irving, Bron, KLove and a solid bench got beat.
You can debate the particulars of the series if you want to, maybe Kyrie expended way too much energy with all the flash, maybe Bron and KLove didn't assert themselves enough offensively, maybe Korver just missed a few open 3's he would normally make.
The macro is this:
What Kevin Durant did in the off season is symptomatic of our culture. He took the easy way out, he didn't care about the means, he only cared about the ends.
Our culture is only concerned with appearances, hence our obsession with social media, hence the rise in narcissism.
People do not seem to realize the sheer oddity of a player of Durant's caliber deciding to join a 73 win team that basically was already the best team in the league by a sizable margin. Especially since his team was up 3-1 and had he and Westbrook figured out how to play a decent 48 minutes they would have met Cleveland in the finals.
Now the Warriors are about to sweep the field, and it happened because a player was allowed to tip the balance of power in an extremely lopsided manner.
The fact is that this has never happened before. LeBron went to average or lottery teams and made them contenders, he didn't JOIN a contender to make them a super contender. He still wanted to show that HE was a major part of the reason that his team made it to the top of the mountain, he relishes the JOURNEY.
Durant just wants the outcome. Its like a dude who can't lose his virginity so he hires a hooker. All that matters to him is busting a nut, not a meaningful connection.
We no longer seem to be interested as a culture in an authentic meaningful experience, we just want the outcome that we imagine will make us happy. Our instant gratification culture has bled into major sports now, with this move being defended and glossed over as okay and justified with various precedents.
I am reminded of when I was a teenager and we would go to my cousin's house to play Risk. He would always win, which seemed odd at the time. Years later he admitted to us that he always stacked the deck so that he would always have more soldiers than we did.
The NBA is now a sport where the team with the best shooters wins, by virtue of the fact that officiating is skewed towards the offensive player. When the game is less physical it becomes purely a matter of offensive ability. The Warriors, already having the best offense in the league were allowed to add the best offensive player not on their team onto their team.
And now the anticlimactic result of the Warriors winning has happened, and they will of course win again next year, barring a major choke job or a major injury. They will have home court and will be damn near impossible to beat in a best of seven series.
The Cavs will retool and arm themselves up even further so that they can compete, cementing a fourth straight finals appearance of the same two teams. What a snooze fest.
The reason people are touting around as to why Durant made this move is that supposedly players are only measured by whether they won a championship and by how many they have won and so he did what made 'sense' to cement his legacy...
In essence what they are admitting is that our culture has become so shallow and transparent that we only care about the end result, not the journey, not the details.
We only care about cliff notes, not actually reading the book.
We judge people based on meaningless numbers, not the details.
We read our news in bite size chunks because we lack the patience for meaningful content.
Our news articles contain fewer and fewer facts and more conjecture and propaganda.
Championships are the measure of greatness, not actual skill or impact. It matters not that this was a cakewalk, what matters is the outcome.
I myself have no desire to watch the NBA anymore, no parity, no post play, all threes and layups, every team is adopting the same style of play. The league is becoming homogeneous and what makes matters worse is that the officiating is as terrible as its ever been.
What is the point of watching something if you know the outcome?
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