I'm stuck at the office right now. It's been a few weeks since I've been in (work has been slow beyond words since the boss went away on business), but it's still awful waiting around 'til 11pm (or whenever) to go home.
I know a girl who's in a bit of a vampire craze because of Twilight. She also likes violent R-rated horror films like Saw. Thirst is playing in my area next month. Since I'm a fan of Park Chan-Wook (seen all his 2000s films) I figured I might ask her if she'd want to see it with me. I haven't asked her feelings on subtitles. Considering our mutual interests, do you think it'd make a good 'date' movie?
And (again NO SPOILERS please), in terms of content, how bad is it with gore and sex? Would you say moreso than Oldboy or less? She's not one to faint at the sight of gore (she saw George Romero's Land of the Dead, for example) but I don't think she'd like something on the level of Ichi the Killer.
1. Ask me to take pictures of any aspect of my life you're curious about 2. Leave your requests as comments to this entry 3. Please look at the previous requests as to not do repeats 4. I'll snap the pictures and post them in a later entry
Please do this one! It sounds interesting, and I really want to do it, since I've actually been using my camera lately.
Have kind of been an intense fan of Bricolage ever since solipsized put Footsteps on a mix last year. Obviously mondo stoked to get my hot hands on their 2009 full-length. Bright, energetic, anthemic pop. Along with Obi Best and Fight Like Apes, they have been on repeat a lot around here! Trying to classify them beyond "good Glasgow post-punk". There's some old-fashioned harmonizing, a little Smiths on Turn U Over, some funky percussion, even a touch of Darts of Pleasure Franz on Flowers of Deceit. And I think we can all agree that was the best of the Franzes. I defy you to find major flaws in this music
Unless obv you dislike post punk but then you are probably some kind of monster
01. Bayonets 02. Flowers of Deceit 03. Footsteps 04. Plots Are For Cemeteries 05. The Spoilsport's Retort 06. Looting Takes the Waiting Out of Wanting 07. A Terrible Souvenir 08. Turn U Over 09. 6th For Poet 10. On the Omnibuses 11. Sleepwalk to Me 12. The Waltzers
Nice Baudelaire ref lol. Ignore the cliche deer head, here is hoping it is ironic! Footsteps is still the best of the set, but the album seriously lives up to the EP.
Posting up a couple of non-album tracks as well, because bands like this tend to sound even better on minimal production. I do not have the titles of these extremely nice songs though sobbb, anyone know them?
today we visited the wonderful farmer's market in dover! after that we dropped off a donation to the humane society. they're starting up a new shelter so i put a box at work and a few people donated items. it was so fun to go shopping at the dollar store for the puppies and kitties! we got some free puppy chow (the human kind!) and entered into a raffle because we donated, which i thought was really nice.
so i've had my nose in books for most of 2009; i raised my head recently and realized how down i've been. i saw whcaufield's post enumerating a list of what's been good about music in 2009 thus far. i hadn't listened to any new music all year. so i locked myself up with an internet connection and a pair of earphones, and, well, this is the result.
The AX of an odd year is always a crapstorm, but I had a good time despite. We even made it to the Edison for their improvisation jazz and occidentalist burlesque night (vaguely relevant to current interests :Dv), and spent a lot of downtime walking around the Financial District. I dig the LA Library guys nnnnn. I only wish the dudes I love so much didn't have such a bad time by comparison ;A; Lots and lots of things going wrong, people getting sick, people getting hurt. One of the things that happened, the police were involved! I have some hilarious stories as well, which I will probs talk about at length over IM, you've been warned haha. Anyway I didn't really get to rest for what felt like the entire con. I remember one sweet hour of the best sleep I ever experienced, rudely interrupted by someone coming in to report that one of the sick people had thrown up a little blood and I needed to cover their shift. TB?????!! D: D: D:
I guess I am pretty buoyant usually, idk, but under prolonged stress and time constraints I get super super short with people. I am a bad person. I hear I still sort of got the award for being the friendliest staffer behind the desk in the late hours, but that was only due to ULTIMATE EFFORT. And still I remember yelling at bawwwing attendees to sit the hell down. I mean, I like. I later reread some of the text messages I sent out in the interim and I just covered my face with my hands. APOLOGIES TO EVERYBODY, I was a jerk.
RE: cosplays, I didn't do it, sry2say. There were some wig and clothing malfunctions that could have been fixed very easily had I the time to run out to the store for a couple of hours, but obv that was not feasible. Defs doing it for Otakon, when I shall not have to dress up alone. Will feel braver about it with Muun by my side s-sob
My beloved readers! How are you doing? What have you been up to? It's been too long -- almost three months! -- since last we met.
I'm not quite sure how it happened, this gap in communications. It's partly because I went traveling. I spent a month in New York with only an iPod Touch to keep in touch. I imagined I'd have something to tell you about the music scene in New York, something I could tap out on the iPod's tiny keyboard. But in the end I was so busy doing other things that I hardly saw any live music.
The only new band I discovered this time in New York was Twi The Humble Feather, a trio who play acoustic guitars and sing in ways that remind me of the Animal Collective (though they're a bit tired of that comparison). In the video lounge at the back of Monkeytown in Brooklyn I saw the Twi trio play a refreshing, relaxing set accompanied by the quirky projected animations of Nobuko Hori, one half of the Matsuri-kei girlband Groopies.
When I got back to Berlin, a funny thing happened. Kyoka, the other half of Groopies, brought the touring guitarist from the metal band Korn round to my house. It turned into a real-world re-enactment of my last column, in which I attempted to scandalize my own internal "good taste Taliban" by listening to music I wouldn't normally tolerate.
Shane Gibson sat on my sofa and politely watched the Mower videos I cued up for him, before taking control of my bluetooth mouse and showing me songs by (ahem!) "progressive metal" bands Sikth and Meshuggah. I made polite noises, but my inner Taliban hated them.
Metal music out of context doesn't have to be a bad thing, though. I heard a nice example when I attended Dexter Sinister's "documents opera" True Mirror Microfiche at the ICA in London in late June. Hunched at overhead projectors or standing stiffly at podiums, actors and art world personalities performed press releases and read pages of text, interrupted occasionally by a guitarist and drummer who played very short, very loud phrases from a Napalm Death song. The dryly cerebral texts were beautifully counterbalanced by the aggressive spurts of grindcore; the dream collaboration of Apollo and Dionysus.
But the music that's touched me most over the last couple of months hasn't been Western, and hasn't been rock. I heard street musicians in the Athens district of Kerameikos playing the most beautiful Balkan mountain music on accordion and clarinet. I held a pajama party at my flat in which we played only Greek Orthodox church music and the music of the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, and it was the most fun party I've ever had; we whirled till our skirts spun high!
Most of all, I was impressed by an American called Jonny Olsen, who's become a big star in Laos and Thailand singing his own version of the local folk music. As the No Age blog explains, Jonny was a skate kid in California who started working in a Thai vegan café and, through it, fell in love with Thai culture.
Jonny Olsen moved to Thailand, mastered the language and several traditional instruments, and began making records. He's now a pop star there and in neighbouring Laos -- an incredible cultural chameleon, and an example to us all. With love and dedication, anything is possible!
I could've flipped you, for real. I mean, look at me. I'm really tall, pale, kind of useless in an aristocratic way, and with my mastery of fire in a plastic tube you'd probably think I was some kind of Hyperborean love-god. My father flew in airplanes every day of his life. Seriously. Ten minutes, you're playing for the other team and loving every minute of it. L'amour à la plage lesbienne. You, me, your hexameters, my antepenult, some hendecasyllabics, what do you say, cara mia? Conjugate and conjugal aren't just lip-locking-close dictionary page-mates or near incestuous offspring of a common PIE root (but they are), they're practically the same word. Rough breathing, indeed. Oh, it could be that it might never work. I know you aren't like the other girls You don't play games. You could kick my ass. And what on earth, would even half, even a third of my exes know what a loom is? And what if you met a real Norseman? I'd be fucked then, abso-tively. Anyway, would you accept I was the man in the relationship and otherwise? You're all fire and passion and that without tan-lines--could you be tender? Would you accept my delicate sensibilities? Poetic, yes, but sweeter. And secular. Unsuperstitious. Still I can't get you off my mind. I know, I wish, me, too.
I moved to the Neukolln neighbourhood I live in because of the market that happens twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. To give you some idea of the importance of this food and cloth market to me, I'll say that it can totally lift me out of the foulest mood, supply the kind of visual excitement I once got from Tokyo street fashion, and compensate for some of the limitations I run up against in other parts of Berlin. The most important adjective for the Maybachufer market is "Turkish".
Here are the gözleme girls from whom I bought my lunch yesterday at the market. They work at a window facing the street, three of them in a row. I find their pattern-clash muslim workwear style totally admirable. Gözleme is a filled, griddled flap of lavas bread, a recipe from Turkish mountain villages. You can have your pancake with spinach, cheese, lamb, potato or sweet fillings. Here's a video of someone griddle-baking the dough and adding the fillings:
There's a new "designer's market" which runs from time to time on Saturdays at the same Maybachufer location, but I have to say I find it super-lame. It's a product of white gentrification of a predominantly Turkish neighbourhood, and represents the "Boxhagenerification" of the Maybachufer (the Boxhagenerplatz market, like others in Berlin areas where the demographic skews white, focuses on slightly hip, slightly ironic goods). Stalls at this occasional, subtly menacing, designer's market sell vinyl bags with rounded 90s logos on them, models of the Berlin TV tower, twee hamster mousepads, pink t-shirts with "cool" slogans on them, perfumed soaps, and Jarvis Cocker glasses made of wood-effect adhesive. No gözleme are for sale, but sausages sizzle on grills.
The colours, smells, shapes and references of the Saturday designer's market are as "wrong" as the colours, smells, shapes and references of the Tuesday and Friday market are "right". They're "wrong" not because they're a culture I don't understand, but because they're a culture I understand all too well. After all, I'm one of the white people gentrifying this neighbourhood. Turkish people would just look blank if you said "Jarvis Cocker", but I know exactly what the cardboard Jarvis glasses and the cardboard Terry Richardson camera are about. They're references to a culture I'm part of. But it's a culture I wish would widen its horizons a bit, and love itself less.
The Wikipedia entry on Turks in Germany points out the ways in which Turks-in-Germany differ from the Germans -- and therefore, you could say, provide a corrective alternative to the limitations of life in Germany.
First of all, the Turks are younger than the Germans. Whereas 25% of Germans are over 60, only 5% of Turks are. This means that if you're living in a Turkish neighbourhood, it's going to feel a lot more youthful than a German neighbourhood. Secondly, the Turks are more urban than the Germans. They mostly opt to live in high density inner city communities thronging with small-scale commerce. This provides a bustling, lively street life notably missing from other parts of the city.
The Turks are working class, but also bi-cultural; they're likely to travel more, in a year, than the average German, clocking up air miles with cheap flights to and from Turkey. The Turks in Germany vote, massively, for the red-green alliance -- in 2005 90% of them voted for the socialists and greens. A majority of Germans, meanwhile, elected conservatives.
Turks were invited to Germany as "guest workers", and therefore there was no expectation, either from themselves or the Germans, that they would assimilate. Instead, they've integrated -- complementing German culture rather than reproducing it, becoming a syntagmatic element in the German sentence -- a qualifier -- rather than a paradigmatic one.
This is probably Freud's "narcissism of minor differences" at work, but if I hear music floating from a nearby flat into the evening air, I vastly prefer it to be Turkish music than anything from "my own" culture. And -- while it's nice to have art events, organic cafes and ice cream stores and trendy mobile coffee stalls in our hood -- I continue to be much more inspired by the style of the Anatolian gözleme girls on the Maybachufer than by people carrying vinyl bags with logos of the TV tower on them.
I saw Transformers 2 on Friday. I went in with very low expectations. It wasn't as bad as the first one, but I still felt myself getting dumber by the minute. (And given the extraneous length of the film, that's pretty dumb.) It's also astounding how vulgar it was for a movie that millions of kids are going to see. (Yes, the producers say it's not aimed at kids... but come the fuck on, it's Transformers, they have a massive toy line based on it.)
I took a bike ride down to the main street today, and ended up taking an extended tour of the old neighbourhood. Not usually a good idea, because I end up in a melancholy state feeding off my past regrets. (Of course, the passing of Martin Streek, a somewhat important figure in my youth, didn't help.)
В 1773 году Словарь Французской академии объяснял слово «кастрат» (саstrato) так: «Мужчина, оскопленный таким способом, чтобы его голос был сходен с женским или детским. Кастратов много в Италии».
In 1773 the french academy defined a castrato as a man whose testicles were scraped in order for his voice to sound like that of a woman or a child. There are many a castrato in Itlay.
I always forget how delicious watermelon tastes, especially in hot & swampy-like weather. It even took the dreary out of the day. This is one of the rainiest summers I've ever lived through and that's saying a lot because Texas summers are full of sudden thunderstorms.
A massive Computer Arts Projects cover collaboration for an issue on character design that is due out in stores in the coming weeks. Besides us the list of contributing artists includes Peskimo, Mark Verhaagen, Tado, Niark 1, Mijn Schatje, Jon Burgerman, 123 Klan, Triclops studio, Jeremyville, Lunartik, Alexis West, Loworks, Sourbones, Skaffs, Aaron Miller, Eboy, Superdeux, Misu2020, Motomochi, Meomi, 64 Colors, Supakitch, and Gavin Strange.
We don't really think of ourselves as character designers in any sense, but it was still nice to be chosen and i had fun messing about in Illustrator again after so many years away from the program. I was also feeling pretty moody at the time, which i think really guided the design for this guy. I call my character "Emptyheaded" for lack of a more clever name.
Reality struck me as the clock turns 00.00 on July 8th:
I'M 30 YEARS OLD, starting TODAY! (*゜ロ゜)； イヤだぁあああああ～～～～～～!!!
But... as the saying goes... "Life begins at 30", so I'm just gonna enjoy myself for the next 10 years and say the same thing all over again when I reach 40: "Life begins at 40"! *LOL*
utaoutao made me a very nice drawing of Jin wishing me a happy birthday! ~~~ヾ(＾∇＾) ありがとうございます ピナちゃん～＼（＾ ＾）／
So, without large fonts and sparkly colorful background (like I did to Jin's birthday post below):
Happy Birthday to myself! I fall down, but I get up again. I lose faith in people.... and I start trusting all over again. The cycle never ends.... but I know God's love will always fill me up whenever I'm at the bottom of the cycle.
On June 25th, I was having a nice day out, reading the newspaper in a sunny cafe, whiling away the time, watching Transformers 2 in the cinema. It was my 25th birthday and I was trying to enjoy myself. On the next day I heard the news of Michael Jackson's death on the radio in the car. Today is his funeral, and I am saddened by the loss of this great talent. Rest in Peace. Maybe it's me getting older, but somehow too many people I liked and admired died this year.
One of the neighborhood cats hurt his paw and has been limping back and forth across the street. It's the big slow yellow dirty one who likes to lay in my yard and the neighbor's driveway and sometimes on my porch. He's the first cat I remember seeing around here and I'm worried about him, I think he's losing weight. I've thought about putting food out for him but I don't really want him on my porch because he was mean to my cat once, and the possum would probably just eat all the food anyway. Except I don't think the possum is around anymore. I think now just a snake lives where the possum used to live. At first I thought maybe the snake and the possum lived in there together, but now I don't think they do, I think they would rather kill each other than live together.
In the afternoon it's hot out and I ride my bike or drive my truck to get places. Lots of days I see a scrawny old man standing in his yard with his hat on and his shirt off and he lifts up his arm at me as I go by in my truck. I'm always driving with my left elbow out the window and my left hand in a raised fist and my forehead leaning on the fist and I open my hand up in salute when the old man raises his wobbly arm towards me.
But in the evening it is cool and the yards are deep and green and purple with lightning bugs. Last night when I was walking west down the hill I heard a buzzing and it was a man giving his son a haircut on their porch. The man's wife was on the porch too, watching everything, and she smiled at me and I smiled at her but she couldn't see because I was in the shadow of the trees and sidewalks and she was lit up by the porchlight.
Two nights before, in a different part of the neighborhood, someone jumped off a porch I was walking past and said "Hey hi how're you" and I said "I'm awlright, how're you" and he nodded quickly and then someone else crashed out the door of the same house and yelled "Call the police! That fucker just stabbed me! He borrowed my paintbrush and then he just stabbed me gimme your cellphone!" I stopped walking and looked around and the first guy was gone and the second guy was holding a paintbrush but he wasn't bleeding or anything and I didn't see any knife sticking out of him. Then a girl threw open the door and came out of the house waving her cellphone and screaming for the police and I hurried home.
My new goal when I go for walks is to start saying Hey or Hi or Hello to everyone I meet. Probably either Hey or Hello. Hullo. If I can teach myself to be friendly to people I don't know, maybe eventually I can learn to be friendly with people I do know.
I am here today to explain Tanabata in a nutshell, so that you, too, can celebrate this horribly depressing holiday. Or however you want to look at it. This is the basic version, there are a million spin-offs or bits left out.
Okay, so the story is (paraphrased) like this.
A god has a daughter who is a princess and he loves very much. She runs away, falls in love with a shepard. Then, blah blah blah, the punishment is that she's flung into the far reaches of the heavens. Blah blah blah, crying, apologizing, ba-blah.
The Resolution: One day out of every year (today), she is granted permission to return to earth to be with her (apparently immortal) shepard-lover. From the heavens, she seeks him out on earth. However, if it is cloudy, she can't see him and must wait another year for her next chance to have at him. Dads can be a bitch, yeah? Today was cloudy, which made me incredibly sad, and I know that's silly, but I just want the universe to be nice :P
In conclusion, please hug/kiss/cuddle your loved one today and repeat these words, "That's from Shiy, because she reminded me that I should love and be happy and grateful for what I have, while I still have it." (And you better be grateful, too, because things could be a lot worse)
1. Every few years I shave my head. The first time I did it was when I was 26, and had just signed to Creation. I wanted to look harder, less bourgeois. The next time I did it was when I was 33. You can see it on the Pierre et Gilles Timelord cover. There was another shave when I was 40 and living in New York, and another four years later. I did it again this weekend.
2. It's not like you suddenly say to yourself "I know, I want to look bald!" or "I want to resemble Namihei, the father in Sazae-San!" But sometimes you get the sudden impulse to do it. To shave it all off! For the way it feels!
3. It was really hot and humid last week. Hisae was out at the dentist. I was shaving my stubble with my American electric shaver as usual, going up my sideburns. I went a little further up, then a little further.
4. At this point I should say that Hisae hates men with shaved heads. In fact, she's often told me that if I shave my head again, she'll leave me. So I was taking a risk. I'd have some explaining to do.
5. Nevertheless, I couldn't help pushing the warm, oiled, buzzing shaver further across the side of my head. The resulting fuzz felt so cool, so smooth! My heavy, hot hair fell to the floor soundlessly. It felt reckless, transgressive!
6. I played around with half-shaved styles for a while. Ha ha ha! Mohican! Bald uncle! Blind nutter!
7. When Hisae got back from the dentist, she was truly appalled. "I'm going to leave you!" she screamed. "That looks horrible! Who are you? Are you a monk?"
8. "Well, at least other girls won't like me now!" I said. "Yes, and neither will I!" retorted Hisae.
9. We eventually negotiated that I would wear Curly Carl, my performance wig, until my hair grew back.
10. We went out that evening to see Ben Butler and Mousepad play at Madame Claude's. I wore the wig. People looked at me very strangely. But they do that anyway.
11. When we got home, Hisae was in a more conciliatory mood. "The wig makes you look like you have cancer. It's okay not to wear it. I'll just wait patiently for your hair to return."
12. I both hate my new shave and love it.
13. Good points: It feels really nice and fresh. I feel streamlined, and I can feel excess heat just evaporating effortlessly away through the top of my head.
14. Bad points: It's really difficult to look good with a shaved head. I don't like how it looks, and I like even less how it's going to look in a couple of months, as it grows out. See the photo above with Kumi Okamoto, for instance. It's at that horrible standy-uppy phase. It'll be doing that in about three months from now.
15. My hair has been thinning for at least the last ten years. It's happening very, very slowly, but every time I shave my head I wonder "Will it grow back?" Each time it does I'm pleasantly surprised, even if it's clearly thicker in some areas than others.
16. I don't really like the hairline or the head shape a shave reveals: I have a pronounced widow's peak and a double crown.
17. Men try to compensate for having no hair by growing a big bead or wearing interesting spectacles (the red "Buggles" ones above belong to Emma Balkind), but they always just look like... men trying to compensate for having no hair.
18. On the other hand, lots of people have a ton of hair and still look crap. Yes!
19. In a sense, waiting for hair to grow back is condemning yourself to months of unhappiness with your own appearance. Was that spontaneous decision to shave really worth those months of pain?
20. At the same time there's something energising and delightful about a shaved head. It feels so good, so prickly, under your palm! People love to touch it! It's -- literally, if not stylistically -- cool!
21. I also notice that the times I've had a shaved head tend to correspond to times I've had a surprising amount of success with women. Even if I thought I looked bad, something seemed to appeal. I think one reason might be that when you have a shaved head you look like a huge, erect, walking penis. That works, you know, subliminally on women. When they look at you, something deep in their subconscious says "Penis!"
22. Despite the obvious compensation of "looking subliminally like a huge erect walking penis", I wish I hadn't shaved off my hair! Oh well, it'll grow back. Possibly.
The eggplant has come in really well, and so has the corn.
There was an announcement about the Nodame movie! They all are working really hard in Vienna. They are very excited to be filming at the Musikverein Wien.
At the concert I saw at the Musikverein, Ricardo Muti was the conductor. And now in that same place Tamaki-kun is conducting, Juri-chan is there...The camera is rolliing... amazing..
I have to work hard too...
I had to take a little rest because of my appendix. But since we had already decided the contents of tankoban vol. 22, its release will proceed in August as planned. We missed 2 chapters of the serialization and are deciding how to proceed with those one at a time. Starting with the July 25 release of Kiss, there will be 3 chapters in a row. And since the deadline is very close, I have to really put in some time-----.
[PICTURE OF ELEPHANT EAR PLANT]
Once again, from my garden. The elephant ear is like an umbrella. It is, after all, the rainy season..
I was on a boat, at any rate. On Friday after beers on Third Beach (for Adam's b-day) with Josh, Mo, Trent and friends, we were riding along the seawall somewhere east of Yaletown when Trent spotted what he was pretty sure was Drew's boat. "Drew!" he called, and Drew called back, "Hello!" So we went and hung out on Drew's boat for a while. People were eating ginormous freshly-trapped crabs, drinking beer, listening to music inside the boat and listening to Drew and his friend play guitar and muted trumpet, respectively, on deck. The view was beautiful and it was just generally a really fantastic fun time.
This weekend I played several more hours of Final Fantasy II (IV for the purists), and read a couple hundred more pages of Quicksilver. In other words, I was fairly sedentary. Quicksilver is pretty awesome so far, although people's (I think specifically trochee?) descriptions of his sex scenes are pretty accurate. They're all mechanical and physiological and overall extremely un-sexy. Sorry Neal, you win at a lot of things, including awkward nerd-sex.
My uncle is on the cover of the Vancouver Sun today, playing trombone.
saturday was spent with brit, heath and heather. jared had to work and that made me sad. we sat around our make shift fire pit, listened to music and ate bbq chips. pretty american, right?
on friday night jared and joey successfully hosted their first every-friday-in-july-wes-anderson-movie-night! they showed bottle rocket and this week it'll be rushmore! trying to figure out what kind of snack to make for the evening.
i've joined some swaps on swap-bot. it's been far too long since i've had a nice flow of mail going in and out of my post box. for a long time, there was hardly ever a day without getting some sort of mail art/pen pal letter/swap. it's my fault though. the more i send, the more i get back.
currently listening to great lake swimmers and thinking about taking a nap. (i've been listening to them a lot lately..along with neko case) today i just feel kind of drained/blah/frumpy. a cup of tea and a nap can cure just about anything.
i'm working on some new sewing projects. i've found out that i really enjoy listening to neko case when i'm making stuff. she's like a creative, little muse that goes in through my ears and out through my hands. when i get my stuff all together and organized i'll put some things up on etsy. my mom is currently in the process of getting approved to be a vendor at the tuscarawas farmer's market. i'm really excited about it. i'm so happy that such a great thing is happening in this area. i'm hoping to sell some things if she gets a booth.
I'm basically done with the robe, and I'm going to create the sash tonight. There are some things I definitely wish I'd done differently (the trim just doesn't lay right) but here it is anyway:
i am incredibly run down and just plain down because alexa left for a month today. I've been sitting around trying to write songs for psyche kick, but i just keep playing the riff from pink frost. i haven't had much time to relax in a week. i need downtime. I already had an ulcer!
marlene my kitty= cute.
new shipyards record: yukon dentistry.
oh by the way that reminds me, did i mention my bands ever? here are my bands:
collapsing opposites/// myspace.com/collapsingopposites [[fractured songwriting styles///pop music glory]] role mach/// myspace.com/rolemach [[james chance king crimson carl orff]] shipyards/// myspace.com/shipyardsband [[NOISE]] also i was in slight birching/raw beast, but we haven't played in a while.
okay, here is probably a slightly more fun-to-read in that schadenfreude kind of a way update entry.
the no-fun parts are:
1. i am broke. miserably broke. this-curry-has-to-last-3-days, showering-less-to-make-bath-products-last-longer, dirty-clothes broke. i owe people money, my debt is mounting and all my shoes are falling apart. of course with some simple budgeting and money management i would be doing just fine, but we all know i am definitely no good at that. my job is part time, so i am making about 540$/month. everyone knows my parents help me out, so i am in no danger of becoming homeless or starving to death, but it's not fun. i am afraid of finding a second job or taking on more hours because i feel like i'd freak out and not be able to handle it. they like me at work right now, which is rare since once my initial charm wears off, employers tend to hate me... i don't want to risk losing whatever modicum of respect i have by taking on too much and becoming a stresscase.
2. somehow, increasingly over the past few months, my self-worth and body image have taken a nosedive. not that i ever had a very high opinion of myself to begin with, but i cannot stop obsessing over how i feel like i've been ripped off in the looks department. i am obsessed with convincing myself that my boyfriend isn't sexually attracted to me, and in my spare time i look at plastic surgery websites and photos of bodies i wish i had. it is completely driving me mental and i wish i could just take a deep breath and be happy with what i've got. what's the deal guys? does this ever go away? am i alone here or what?
3. i feel completely enslaved to cigarettes. i attempted to quit yesterday only to smoke again within 12 hours. pathetic. i have a feeling that my mind is too feeble and i am too neurotic to quit smoking without extensive therapy.
4. a huge part of me really wants to live at home again! i daydream about being able to walk downstairs and have someone to talk to, and to have my chores shared with other people so they don't seem so monumental. as it is right now i spend barely any time at home because i get too lonely and if i have a whole day to spend by myself i don't know what to do other than visit friends at work and go out for lunch and read the newspaper.
5. i am getting dumber by the minute. didn't i used to be a good writer and reasonably intelligent? or am i just imagining that.
so i dunno. i guess that even though i can't argue with the fact that i am happier and healthier than ever, i am still pretty much crazy.
this was a bike ride i took (pretty standard vancouver ride). it took 2 hours. i want to do it again tonight, but i don't think i have time, so i'll settle for riding my bike to andrew's house while listening to some sweet 60s Trojan jamz on my headphones. i stopped under the lion's gate bridge and called andrew while watching a heron diving for and eating fish.
i guess that's been kind of good for the past few days. i had friday off, so i made andrew meet me at burrard station so we could go for thai food downtown. afterwards i made him walk around with me for hours and we sat on the grass by the province building and went to T&T for groceries. and then the bike ride yesterday -- i get so stuck in south granville, since i work 2 blocks from my house (and alternately commercial drive, where andrew lives). i kind of forget that vancouver is a city with tall buildings and a "downtown core", so it was nice to remind myself of that.
It's the question our moonwalking grandchildren will ask us: where were you when you were asked by a major media outlet for your reaction to the death of Michael Jackson? And what did you say?
Jarvis Cocker ended what was apparently a lacklustre appearance on BBC TV's Question Time with an attempt at the question he'd obviously been invited there to answer: Had the media over-reacted to Jackson's death? Cocker, of course, had interrupted Jackson's Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards with a weird arse-flapping intervention -- rather feebly choreographed, it has to be said, in comparison with performance artist Michael Portnoy's spastic-electric Soy Bomb dance beside Bob Dylan at the 1998 Grammys:
Jarvis told the Question Time audience that Jackson hadn't made a great record in twenty years, was pretending to be Jesus, and had invented the moonwalk. Fact-checking suggests that tap-dancer Bill Bailey invented the moonwalk and that David Bowie was the first rock performer to use it onstage (Bowie also arguably did the Jesus thing first too, since Ziggy was "a leper messiah").
My own mainstream media reaction to Jackson's death -- you can be my grandchildren now, since I won't have any -- came in the form of an AFP wire article by Shaun Tandon, syndicated yesterday. After 'King of Pop', an Empty Throne wonders -- rather in the way people wondered when Peel died -- whether anyone will be able to fill the void Jackson left. I was probably asked because I'm known for saying, in a 1991 essay entited Pop Stars? Nein Danke!, that "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people". That essay ended: "The King is dead. Long live the peoples!"
The AFP article has me saying: "Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop". The article continues: "Momus pointed to the rise of digital culture, which has fragmented music consumers into small, targeted audiences. "Then there's the question of the sheer rarity of Jackson's combination of talents, his neurotic work drive and his eccentricity. Lightning like that takes a long time to strike twice," Momus told AFP."
Actually, the original quote I supplied said rather more -- spot the bits AFP left out: "Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Three major factors will prevent there ever being another one: digital culture and its fragmentation of the big "we are the world"-type audience into a million tiny, targeted audiences; the demographic decline of the "pigs in the pipe" (the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y, who made pop music's four-decade-long pre-eminence possible); and the decline of the influence of the United States."
The AFP article ends with me in a head-to-head disagreement with Jerry Del Colliano, a professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California. Del Colliano thinks that stars will emerge from social networking software.
"Momus, however, believes that social networking may have the opposite effect. He said the world may be headed back to what celebrated sociologist Pierre Bourdieu found in 1960s France -- white-collar workers preferred high-brow classical music, while manual laborers listened to cheap pop. "A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson 'intelligently,' people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him 'passionately.' But everybody spoke about him," Momus said. But social networking is now limiting interaction among groups with different tastes, Momus said. "I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described," he said."
Since this is my blog, not a syndicated wire service, I'll run the original quote I gave AFP in full:
"I think we're seeing the re-appearance of class and caste. Michael Jackson's fame comes from a cultural period -- postmodern global consumerism -- when the distinction between high and low collapsed. When Pierre Bourdieu surveyed French cultural tastes in the 1960s, he found that blue collar and white collar workers had completely different cultures -- classical music for the brain workers, cheap pop for the hand workers. A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson "intelligently", people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him "passionately". But everybody spoke about him. Now that postmodernism is coming to an end, and now that narrowcasting and social networking limit our encounters with "the class other", I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described in "Distinction"."
The King of Pop is dead, long live pithy, battling Kings of Pop Sociology! For fifteen global media minutes, anyway.
The death of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch on Tuesday struck me harder than the death of Michael Jackson. She was someone incredibly cool, beautiful and talented, someone I'd followed and admired over the years.
I never queued for Michael Jackson concert tickets, but I did queue for Pina Bausch returns at the Paris Opera in February 1991, and when a few precious second-row box seats for Iphigenie auf Tauride (a piece she premiered in 1974) became available, Suzy and I sprinted up the baroque hall to the box office to grab them. Here's a glimpse of what we saw, and of Bausch's originality (note the "coughing dance"):
I never wore out VHS tapes of Jackson in concert, but I watched over and over again my tape of a Pina Bausch video, set in Wuppertal, broadcast on Channel 4 at some point in the late 80s. I never made a pilgrimage to Neverland, but I did go to Wuppertal, where Bausch's company was based, and ride the town's monorail, slung over its winding river, because I'd seen it in my Bausch tape, with dancers and a cellist. As far as I was concerned, Wuppertal only existed to give Pina Bausch a theatre. Simple as that.
Where did I first hear about Pina Bausch? It must have been from Lois Keidan, who ran the Live Arts department at the ICA. I was completely in thrall to Lois in the late 80s, and anything she said was good just had to be investigated. Lois had worked with Michael Morris, who said in his tribute in The Guardian the other day:
"Pina was well known for not talking about her work to journalists. She very rarely talked about her work to anyone at all. Whenever I went to Wuppertal, everything under the sun would be discussed around the dinner table but not the work. It wasn't that she didn't want to; she didn't know how to talk about it. She was not an intellectual. She was motivated only by emotional truth and was not frightened to put difficult and paradoxical feelings on stage, almost as a way of evacuating aspects of humanity that she was fearful of."
Fear -- total terror -- dominated my next exposure to Pina's work. It was 1998, and her 1980 piece Café Müller was playing at the Barbican. I had tickets to see it on a Saturday night, but on the Friday my opthalmologist declared that my cornea had perforated and that I'd need a corneal graft immediately. "What's in your stomach?" he demanded, hopeful that if I hadn't eaten he could perform the operation -- removing the front part of my right eye and sewing the front part of a dead woman's eye on instead -- right away.
I'd recently eaten, so we scheduled the operation for Monday, but I was, for the rest of that weekend, living in dread. Somehow, though, Café Müller lifted my terror, calmed and soothed me. The production seemed to understand pain, and time, and life. The dance lifted me completely out of my distress.
Pina's last week must have been rather like that; she'd been diagnosed just five days before she died with terminal cancer, probably caused by the "perennial cigarette in her hand". The 68 year-old went quickly and efficiently, I hope with a sardonic smile on her proud, beautiful face and her favourite Argentinian tango music playing. Tango comes from the Latin tangere, to touch, and Pina Bausch certainly touched me.
Hey there. I remember watching Arirang TV a few years ago and hearing about a movie that portrayed a teacher/student teacher romance but I can't recall the name. Can anyone give me any pointers?
I'm currently playing "Little King's Story" by Rising Star Games, an RPG adventure simulation strategy everything.
It's the sweetest thing ever. It's got quirky characters and a funny storyline and I should have known being the king of a crayon kingdom is practically the best thing one could ever achieve!
Besides, you have all the classic music you want. Your Highness will be woken up with Edvard Grieg, will fight to the sound of (a quirky version of) the Radetzky March (snap) Overture of Wilhelm Tell, and will have the Bolero or other classic pieces in the background for other things. Very suitable for my little highness!
And the German localization is extremely well done and hilarious in places! The characters speak with accents and dialect and - awwww - they are dyslexic! Sweet!
There is practically nothing I can complain about so far. The bosses are hard, it's fun to play, the only problem is that I can't skip cut scenes, but then again, they're cute over and over again, and I am having a hard time getting my collective of characters up a set of stairs sometimes.
bored
curious
lethargic
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
contemplative
sleepy
moody
Story-teller
1. Every few years I shave my head. The first time I did it was when I was 26, and had just signed to Creation. I wanted to look harder, less bourgeois. The next time I did it was when I was 33. You can see it on the Pierre et Gilles 
