Saturday, November 22, 2008

Asheville Autumn 2008





A chilly weekend in the Little City of Asheville. Snow fell and winds ripped through the streets and the temperature fell below 20°.


But our visit was filled with good food and fine music and a great time. We ate Indian food, and French food, and Tapas to the sound of west coast jazz. And we ate at Tupelo Honey, and that's as good as it gets.





We hit the Jack of the Wood for their Thursday night jam session and listened to mellow bluegrass music as the snow flakes fell outside.




And we visited Thomas Wolfe's house, the Smith-McDowell House, St. Lawrence Basilica and All Soul's Cathedral. What a weekend!

© John Womack, 2008. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Religulous

Save your money. We went to the movie to see Bill Mahr in "Religulous". Not good. We were the ONLY two people in the entire theater, which is not necessarily bad but the entire film looked like a home-movie. No real writing was apparent anywhere in the whole mess, no story was told, just gibbering, disconnected series of comments and a lot of giggling. it lurched around showing disconnected segments of the under-classes of various denominations. A couple of scientists were also shown to be fools, and a renegade Catholic priest (allegedly a senior priest at the Vatican, sans collar and all) was shown deprecating "his" religion. The only unifying theme in the show was simply the presence of Bill Mahr being either innocently stupid or triumphantly victorious in every segment.

There were apparently random occurrences of explosions, pictures of nuclear detonations, destruction and horror quickly blasted across the screen as supposedly “funny” or "instructive" decorations. It also had several clips of the ABSOLUTELY WORST video/movie clips ever seen anywhere, these looked like they had been made with a home movie by a child chimpanzee filming on a pogo stick, then run through a washing machine several times and finally cooked in a microwave. Several of the “intellectual discussions” Mahr had with other people ended with the protagonist caught is a post-production-enhanced stupor of bewilderment. Throughout it all, Bill Mahr always starred as a happily victorious and truly gifted intellectual who was being good-naturally tolerant of poor bumbling religious fools.

True Believers will have their feelings about non-believers confirmed, real religious people will be angry, non-believers will be disappointed and spiritual beings will be sad. Mahr was rude, petty, self-centered and insulting throughout. Too bad because the popcorn was great.

© John Womack, 2008. All rights reserved.