Monday, August 01, 2005

Attention Deficit of a village...


Bought The Idiot today. Read chapter 1. Kept holding off buying Russian literature because, I reasoned, how would I ever teach it to inner-city high schoolers? Heck, forget them.

Throwing another barbecue at my brother's place. In the email invitation, I felt it was necessary to warn people to drive straight ahead and look like they know exactly where they're going - to the house of the only whites in the neighborhood, not to participate in the illicit activities the other whites are visiting for.

The post about the hot virgin is bringing some traffic to this site. Within the last three days, about five people Googled for Johan Khalilian expecting to learn something else about him or some pix or something. Ok, he was a communications major. He's a pretty effective communicator. His mother's Puerto Rican and his father's Persian. He likes Cross Movement and hip hop. That's it for today's gossip information.

The Paste Magazine CD sampler was hard as blood to get out. But worth it. Along with some John Hiatt, the Redwalls, Sun Volt, Death Cab for Cutie, and Frank Black, it's got some Denison Witmer. "East From West." And just like his crony, Sufjan, who along with the Innocence Mission's Don Peris (conspirators on this album) can talk avidly and simply about his Christian faith without the critical backlash. Or at least so much. Adam really seems to like it. So, I'll give it a buy after I drop Illinois in my CD bin.

Sam Ashworth, if memory serves, is Charlie Peacock's son. Paste doesn't rave about his music (3 our of 5), but Matt Slocum (of Sixpence None the Richer), John Davis (Superdrag - I think. I may have to research that), and Fleming McWilliams (wifey part - and supervocalist - of Fleming & John duo) really seem to like him. The song has the air of Peacock's Aim a Little Higher.

9 comments:

  1. "I hate google. I use to come up #7 in a search for my first and last name. I hated that, so I did a few things to get rid of it."

    you got rid of google? or your name?

    if we keep repeating Johan Khalilian, i may remain #1 in the google search.

    was watching 'the cookout' on sunday with my son. wasn't as bad as i feared. but jaRule's character name was Percival Azsmackie. I wanna see if people will come to this site looking for that name.

    and, yeah, the mags def. better than the site, although i'm thinkin' of doing a shopping spree there in a month or so. get some free shipping if i go over $100.

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  2. are you laughing at my pastemusic shopping spree?

    it'll be like those game shows on PAX tv.

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  3. Okay...so you discuss Dostoyevsky, Cambridge professors, and poetry. I discuss "Big Brother", Natalee Holloway, and Taco Bell.

    I feel like I should be saying "The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Plain" over and over...

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  4. stinger,

    thanks for dropping by.

    1) i completely see your point in taking in 'big brother'. after long weeks, esp. during student teaching, i wanted nothing more than to veg out in front of tgif. it really doesn't get more inane than that. well, maybe it does.

    2) natalee holloway sounds like a jazz singer. honestly, i haven't the foggiest.

    3) i can't stand taco bell. but man, i'm addicted to mcdonald's.

    4) trust me, this is all coming out after a really busy week. if you read on, you'll find i'm not all that smarty-smarts. even for a youth minister / unemployed english teacher.

    peace,
    jason

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  5. hey ali...

    missed you at the bbq.

    just wasn't the same w/o you.

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  6. can't say i blame your parents.

    you on the other hand... :)

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  7. Anonymous10:38 AM

    Yo J,

    Guess who?! It's the controversial Johan.

    Just to help shed some light for you on why all the searches for my name.

    There are some people, for reasons unknown to me, that have launched a smear campaign against blend.

    They are using the lie of us giving all of our money from blend to abstinence education. This is completely ridiculous and false.

    I can't believe how crazy people are!

    We even got interviewed about this stuff, here's a lil' snippet:


    Chicago blogs were all abuzz last week with news about recently-opened East Village coffee shop bLENd.

    The simplest version of the story (as we read on The Food Chain) is that bLENd is owned by a founder of the abstinence-only education group Project Reality. We thought this was pretty interesting on a number of levels (not insignificantly the amount of media it has received) so we decided to get in touch with bLENd part-owner and Event Coordinator Johan Khalilian to find out what the connection is.

    Khalilian broke it down for us: "In all honesty, Project Reality has no connection with bLENd. They do not fund us, we do not fund them. We have no intent on funding them or anything abstinence related, they have no intent on funding us." So where does the confusion come from? Why is everyone crying wolf?

    Khalilian told us that he has done work with Project Reality "as a speaker on healthy choices and abstinence." Beyond that, he said that "there is no affiliation with what we are doing at bLENd. There are certain people who have just assumed, because of my stance on abstinence, that bLENd is affiliated in some way shape or form. That assumption is false."

    The funniest thing is that they say I'm one of the founders of Project Reality!

    Project Reality was founded in 1985, I was born in 1979! Either that's another lie or I was the smartest most politically inclined kindergarten boy in the world!

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  8. and here i am, completely ignorant.

    but thanks for sharing this with me before i heard it from somewhere else.

    needless to say, i am not one of those 'chicago bloggers' all abuzz with this news. sorry that i've yet to visit bLENd, and that it's been way under my radar (if y'all opened up one in the western end of logan square, that'd be a different story. for now, the only cafe around my house is starbucks. i'd rather support the locals.

    i think, though, that i'll post this on to a more recent date, like, maybe this year, if that's all right w/ cha.

    j

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  9. Anonymous11:06 AM

    Feel free to communicate some truth bro!

    ReplyDelete

Be kind. Rewind.