Gary Clark Jr.: His Golden Grinder

If anybody claims music nowadays has sold its soul and such, you might want to show them some of Gary Clark Jr. It’s been a while since I stumbled onto good music these days which gives me a certain something, of which roughness somehow could inflame the dancing youth and also brings light alleviation like an old blues. There is energy of an apparent raw talent scorching on fire as Clark performs “Bright Lights” on his EP entitled the same one in 2011. Despite his first major label LP, “Blak and Blu” (2012), didn’t scored any hit single, Clark’s music had made Eric Clapton want to play again, even Buddy Guy thinks he might save the blues, so as mentioned by the Rolling Stone. Through his latest album “The Story of Sonny Boy Slim” (2015), one of his tracks, “Grinder”, which portrays survival struggle of a hard-working man, he transcends some gritty blues-based rock through his heavy grinder. And still on the same album, he lets his tender falsetto croon in “Our Love” sends you back to 1960s classic rock feeling, the kind of gentle music you could listen to while having an afternoon coffee sip or the one which could simply lull you to bed. Influenced by blues, jazz, soul country, as well as hip hop, Clark’s music is like an offspring of past and present; those of soulful smooth vocal of Marvin Gaye, fuzzy guitar chops of Jimi Hendrix, and earthier timbre of John Mayer. Indeed, when he said, “You can look forward to some loud guitar, some sweet guitar. Some things that I’m into”, he just precisely sums up the stark naked truth about his music.

Take a listen to his performance of “Grinder” and “Our Love”. Perhaps then you’ll feel what I feel about this talented soul, Gary Clark Jr.

Her (A Movie Review)

Good Day, Earth. How have you been? It’s been a while since the last time I post in anything, after the Creative Writing class and stuff. Now here I am, brushing up my dusty corner of this self-expressing space *sigh* all over again.

Today I just watched ‘Her’, a 2013 mind-provoking love story directed by Spike Jonze. All of a sudden I think I could use some succinct review of this movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as the lead character. So here it goes..

On a first glance, I had a notion that ‘Her’ is going to be like some documentary-ish romance of a deeply-fall-in-love man who's incapable of moving on from a female, i.e. her ex (crush or lover). And turned out that prejudice is just close enough—except that the subject here is barely a living soul.

Initiated with an acknowledgement of the mankind period under the reign of technology, the film introduced Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a man who practically lives his daily life with it. Theodore, whose job is to write others’ letters, is one of those who grabbed the latest fascinating artificial intelligent operating system. What makes this OS beg to differ is the feature of an intuitive entity which doesn't only listens and response to you, but it also knows you. It gives you sensation of communicating with an actual person, either male or female which has a mutual understanding with you.

By such cultivation on technology, it wouldn’t be impossible then that social interaction between human could get outperformed by an OS, especially to those with an anti-social disposition. That is exactly just about what happened to Theodore, who kept on seeking for a rebound—all of which were aided by technology around—after he got separated from his ex-wife, Catherine. From virtual games to blind-dates, Theodore winded up falling for his disembodied female OS, Samantha.

On his relationship with Samantha, though, the vexation of how real their feelings are often gets at Theodore. Despite the fact that he realized the oddity of such a relationship, he started to think that the feeling and everything about it was real. This led him to fight for her, until one day, he caught up the bitter moment in a conversation with Samantha. He learned the fact that besides talking to him, Samantha also talked to thousands of different people all at once. As if it was not bad enough, it got worsened as he figured out that she was yet to fall in love with numerous of them simultaneously.

Through the film ‘Her’, Jonze likely lets us, indirectly, perceive the social condition of people these days. He thoroughly portrayed the way human started to deduce their social connection with their kind due to the technology advances. Within ‘Her’, we were dragged to the lonely modern world where apparently, not only to facilitate human life, technology is also in charge of human escapism from reality. In this case, the captivating plot has the ability to engage our perspectives and emotions to both Theodore and Samantha. Even the sweet soundtrack, The Moon Song by Karen O also conforms to the melancholy ambient; nicely wrap the whole mood into a single harmony. Ultimately, I’m glad to say that I actually love ‘Her’.

Bag It (A Movie Review)

“What a documentary. I feel like being awakened with a little slap,” was the first thing creeping into to my mind after watching “Bag It”, a 2010 documentary directed by Suzan Beraza.

Last Monday on 6 May, my creative writing class did not come out as usual. Since our lecturer Mas Dalih couldn’t make it to the class, his friend Mbak Abmi took a charge of the class instead. Thank God, she said that we were going to watch this thought-provoking documentary entitled “Bag It” throughout the class.

The film shows us that the ubiquity of plastics in our daily lives has a great impact to the earth ecology as well as the whole beings on it. Jeb Berrier, as a host of this documentary, let the audience know how the production and usage of plastics today are considerably excessive. The plastics are omnipresent, and those are often merely used single time. Without considering the effect to themselves or their environment, people buy and use products packed in plastics, then just simply throw the bags away. What they don’t realize is, the usage of plastics could potentially carry numerous of serious disease to people. They also damage the earth biological life, to mention some in the documentary are the birds that died of swallowing the bottle cap, which made of plastics.

As a documentary, “Bag It” smoothly shows us a substantial issue of our environment nowadays: the matter of plastics as one of major global pollutions. The facts it presents are packed in an informative way that is eye-opening yet also entertaining. It wouldn’t be great unless the film is enclosed with the solution. Fortunately it does. This documentary luckily offers an applicable resolution to the issue it raised: by reducing the consumption of plastics, and use the other alternative instead. After watched this film, guess I’d better do something, start with a little part of my life, like bring my own tumblr or shopping bag rather than contributing to the more bunch of hardly decomposable waste on our beloved mother earth.