Random Thoughts On Pop Culture

• I hope no one honestly believes the "race" flap at the Oscars this year; all the commotion and threats of antics are nothing more than a cynical attempt to get ratings, which have seriously lagged for all self-aggrandizing "award" shows over the past few years; no one in Hollywood does or says anything without first calling their agents and publicists, who in turn check with CCA;  it's all a show, folks.
• What in the hell has happened to the music "industry?"  It used to be music spoke to the heart and soul, tapped into the zeitgeist, stirred up mental processes; now performers compete solely on how big of a train wreck they produce both on- and off-stage.
• There is a big difference between an actor and a performer; Gary Oldman is an actor, Morgan Freeman is a performer.
• Indonesia doesn't have any public libraries, and the world is quickly following suit; it's a shame that people don't read anymore; now-a-days, writers survive by writing scripts, not novels; I love books; I can do my own casting and set designs, proceed at my own pace, never have to recharge the battery, and when I finish a good book I actually feel like the world has changed a little; only problem is that moving a library is a bitch.
• One of the most thought-provoking episodes of the original Star Trek series was called "A Taste of Armageddon." Two planets conduct war via computer simulations, but "victims" are marched into disintegration machines if they are selected to "die."  Most of the wars I see on the "news" these days reminds me a lot of that episode.
• William Shatner is a performer.
• Gardening is a lost art in most urban areas these days; I have always had plants wherever I've lived, even if it's just potted geraniums; potting, feeding, watering, harvesting, and pruning are all very meditative and rewarding activities; watching plants grow forces you to slow down and contemplate the beauty and genius of Nature; gardening is also a hobby that can be practiced well into old age and is more productive and less wasteful of resources than golf.
• Pro-sports are completely senseless, time-wasting spectacles; the whole idea of sport is to participate to promote healthy activity that's a lot more fun that lifting weights and running on treadmills; if you sum up all the effort put into pro sports, think of how much time, money and resources are wasted on watching someone else's exercise, and think of how much could have been accomplished if all that couch time had been applied to something useful (thousands of collective years).
• It used to be that picture books were for kids, and adults would read books that only contained text, because their minds had grown and expanded enough to be able to maintain complex visualizations based solely on words; now picture books are called "graphic novels" and are the pinnacle of modern creativity with multi-billion dollar industries based on these tree wasters and the movie empires they have spawned.
• On my recent trip back home for the holidays, I was shocked at how many people had never heard of Jakarta, much less knew where it was (or even Indonesia for that matter); I realized why Americans like to bomb foreign countries, because for most folks, those places are just abstract unknowns with no sense of reality to them.
• The modern concept of "diversity" is utter bullshit; diversity has come to mean "forced compliance" rather than "widely different."  As is it currently practiced, "diversity" only fosters resentment and animosity, rather than appreciation and solidarity; it used to be you could travel from place to place and experience how other communities and cultures viewed the world and acted upon it; now it's like porridge - an homogeneous bowl of glop with no real excitement; it also meant that if you didn't like a particular culture, you could get away from it; now it lives next door.
• I miss real art; art was once the perfection of raw materials and the idealization of our cultural goals and aspirations; now art is a woman drinking colored milk and puking on a canvas; glorifying someone's mental illness and hanging their effluvia on the wall is not art, it's a publicity stunt; rather than elevating the mind and soul, modern art drags us down into chaos and ugliness.