For example, Mwelde Moore caught a pass in the flat for a short 5 yard first down. Madden, may he rest in peace (I know he’s not dead), would have gone on and on about Mwelde and how tough and smart of a player he is. Fine, great…I think Mwelde Moore is a pretty good football player and am impressed he continues to play. Nevertheless, the interesting part of the play was the Titans were blitzing and the Steelers line picked it up brilliantly. Not only that, but the prescient play calling of the Steelers offensive coordinator, 16 year veteran Bruce Arians, pulled the dangerous DE Kyle Vanden Bosch out into coverage on Moore.

Collinsworth managed to break all of that down for us in all of 5-7 seconds. And that’s what he does every play. Thank the NFL Football Gods. Too bad I won’t be in the country to enjoy it all season.

David Moo, ridiculed anime voice actor and head bartender, works Wednesdays and Fridays. David is well known in the greater Park Slope area among civilians and service industry folk for his creative and precise cocktails, not for Xellos on The Slayers: NEXT and The Slayers: TRY. He is known even less for his wit and wisdom, the topic of this haphazard new Aantiks series, Lessons from Quarter Bar.

This past Wednesday, or was it last Friday?, I was blessed with a sneak peak at David’s new cocktail, You And Me, a play on umami as well as a little liberal counterculture news. ‘The Baffler’s Back!’ raves the Chicagoist in a bland fanboy post. The news was broken on the 24th by some news organization, honestly breaking news doesn’t matter at all anymore, that ‘Thomas Frank is reviving The Baffler, the beloved left-wing magazine of business and culture he started in Chicago in 1988.’ I stole the words in quote from The Observer which provides a quick, informative read to get you up to speed on this cult mag.

David had subscribed to first incarnation of The Baffler, as had a beautiful, married Brazilian girl sitting at the bar with her boyfriend. They gushed over its return providing me and my drunk compatriots with the facts: Frank had criticized our new found prosperity under the Clinton administration – buy now, pay interest – and the budding consumer culture that left no room for any other culture; The old mag was published sporadically, the new mag would be published twice per annum; Frank was from Chicago.

Doesn’t sound terribly counterculture does it? We all put a healthy amount of hot air into the ‘American culture of excess’ balloon. The media doesn’t though. While The Baffler’s critical pronouncements have become mainstream ideas, we still lack an authoritative, or organized, voice dedicated to this particular cultural theme. Hence the exhuming of The Baffler.

David seemed excited about The Baffler 2.0, though I didn’t get a chance to really quiz him on it – my bar mates didn’t quite understand the gravitational pull of the mainstream on fringe ideas (the mainstream is a blackhole, hehe). He made it a point to characterize the mag as counter/fringe culture with a self awareness of its own mainstream mutability. Much of what David talks about is well crafted and thoughtful, but he said this with a hint of pain in his voice. Typically there is alternately fire, love and muted condescension in his voice, but seldom real pain.

Ideas are like summer thunderstorms, hundreds of bolts of electricity arcing from an ether of clouds illuminating your own musings, before you are again left in a long drought with no complementary or supplementary flashes falling from the sky to complete your angle or turn you around. Twitter struck with a June 24th tweet from @BBHLabs asking its followers to discuss the rise of #fringeadvertising signaling the medium’s death at Adbuster Culturejammer HQ. Creative twentysomethings now scoff at older admen wtih such disdain that they forget what the true power of their creativity is. Not only is their power true, but it is great. Uncle Ben’s (Spiderman not rice) words will never be lost on our generation: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. (I’m trying to make sure the clarity this storm brought for me is not lost but attaching something rather weighty and mainstream.)

Are we to rely on old men like Thomas Frank to bail out our culture? Blogging, twittering and Facebook status updating these ideas does not a revolution make. Publishing a magazine, actually fucking publishing a magazine is way harder than blogging, has a weight and tangibility that I’m afraid the Internet does not. Even if the writing on the Internet were to get to a 9th grade level, it still seems an unlikely springboard for a modern “renaissance”. We can write creative copy,  put Patrick Ewing in a Snickers commercial, and continually polish an already shiny Apple, OR we can write about things that really matter to each of us. Possibly, in the process, spending less time in the office.

Will Obama’s silence and the Internet’s furor be the right mix to push Iran in the right direction – that direction not confused with the West?

Son of legendary James Caan (the guy that gets shot up at the tollbooth in Godfather Part I) and one of the stars of the Ocean’s 11 trilogy has a book of photographs out. Found this via NotCot.org, you should definitely check that site out. Way better than this one

The set list was perfectly crafted, starting with a few songs from the new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, easing into the crowd favorites with “Heaven” before bringing them to their feet with the unassailable (expect through sarcasm on this blog) “Once in a Lifetime”. “Burning Down the the House” followed “The Great Curve” (my personal favorite) as the final crowd favorites in the what I believe was the 4 encore section of the show. At that point, still in his tutu I believe, Byrne gently and lovingly brought the crowd down to earth and gave us a soft push out the door into the world again with the hypnotically simple title track from the new album.

The most intriguing part of the show, however, were the interpretative dancers in white. They backed up the music and the more talented ones got a couple soloes in there. Honestly, I’m not sure how to interpret them. I began that sentence with ‘Honestly’ because I had no intention of being ironic. The dancers definitely added to the show. They were/are probably better received in other parts of the country where people actually DANCE at rock concerts. (Mid-atlantic-ers and north easterners don’t know how to use their hips for some reason – something I spend a lot of alone time working on….yeah) Byrne may be on to something by adding dance to rock shows. He is proven to be an innovative amalgamator – Remain in the Light fuses a lot of disparate influences. I can see interpretative dance bring the raw sexuality back to rock’n'roll.

“The world moves on a womans hips
The world moves and it swivels and bops
The world moves on a womans hips
The world moves and it bounces and hops”

Song: The Great Curve,
Album: Remain in the Light
Talking Heads

This ad is a perfect example of how in 1930 we felt the best way to optimize productivity was to have quantifiable control of time. It starts: “The value of the minute is going up fast. At the end of 1930 statistics will show that, during the year, the minute reached the peak of its importance on a dollars and cents basis.” Our thinking has certainly evolved past this anachronism (forgive the pun), but we haven’t embraced the new way of thinking that proffers a less linear, a less left brained method of management. Ultimately the problem is difficulty quantifying new methods of optimizing productivity. Who really understands the value of team building events? Who really understands the value of dispersed workforces collaborating face to face in small groups or in large groups online?

I’d like to know who else is asking these questions and where. Slowly but surely we are all dying and office culture is not enough to sustain us. We need to be elsewhere and do other things to satisfy ourselves. A change in the way that we think about human resources will allow generations of Americans to live better lives.

Pollock conceived One: Number 31 with no thought to the linear, which includes ideas that drive the art investment market. It is a clear expression of his right brain. Conservative iron workers in the Bible belt understand the right brain just as much the rest of us and yet they aren’t included or even accepted in the modern art community. They may not want to understand, but have they been given the chance?

With music and art programs being cut across the country especially with the recession forcing state and local governments to make hard choices, I fear that these under-engaged demographics will lose all chance to understand the intrinsic spirituality and interconnectedness of modern art.

That view strikes me as fatalistic. Maybe economic hardship and global terrorism can bring us together in an organic way and inspire a new generation of expressionist art.