Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Jamey's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, February 15th, 2009
9:08 am	Why I Don't Care for Geek Culture (a response paper from my pop culture class, just because)               Imagine, if you will, a purely hypothetical person who does not exist and is certainly not me.  Like any self-respecting emotionally-stunted overgrown adolescent geek destined for Last American Virgin-dom, he’s read his share of comic books, and not just products of the relatively hip Chris Ware/Daniel Clowes school of alternative comix.  He’s watched the Star Wars trilogy more times than he’d like to admit—okay, more times than he can count—in more versions, and in more varying degrees of sobriety or lack thereof.  He listens to Devo and XTC on a fairly regular basis, although, for what it’s worth, he’s never really bothered with Oingo Boingo.  He actually has a stance on which webcomics are worth salvaging from a field that mostly consists of abominable Penny Arcade clones1.  He has spent way too much of the last few months watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in terms of time and emotional investment.  His sense of humor was permanently warped into something self-consciously obscure and alienating at a fairly young age by the nefarious likes of Monty Python, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Douglas Adams, and The Tick2.  He has a panoply of differently-sided dice, although he can only find them when tabletop gaming is the furthest thing from his mind.  Despite all of these, this person—this sad, sad, imaginary person—has over the years come to acquire a serious distaste for geek culture, fan culture, and above all internet culture.             This distaste might just come down to political differences, and the fact that I3 wasn’t sufficiently tortured by the infamous Nerd-Versus-Jock conflict in high school.  So many self-identified geeks have pretty repellent political views that it’s hard not to be a little turned off by the overweening smugness that characterizes much of the subculture.  They tend to have this sort of Objectivist/faux-Nietzschean idea of how the world works that I, as a lifelong card-carrying bleeding-heart Godless liberal, can’t help but find deeply frightening.  This is probably inspired by a few different things.  First of all, most of us tend to be a little autistic, at least in an informal, self-diagnosed “I have an excuse to act like a robot and/or serial killer most of the time because I read the term ‘Asperger’s’ in a book once” sort of way.  When you think of everything in terms of objective facts, trivial bits of data, neither less nor more—and this problem is exacerbated by the distance the internet gives us, by the way—it’s easy to lose any semblance of human empathy.  Combine that with a steady diet of Conan-and-Starship Troopers-influenced fiction, a self-righteous sense of anger at the society that (again, allegedly, as I never experienced this) spurned us back in high school, and any number of promises made by guidance counselors and hacky journalists that “the geek shall inherit the Earth”, and it’s easy to see why so many members of this subculture view themselves as intellectual übermenschen of the first order4.             This is especially evident in internet culture, where people are not only entitled, but in fact practically required to be assholes for no apparent reason.  The web is peppered with unfunny, insight-free “satire” (the operative neologism here would be “fratire,” although in the material realm, geeks typically despise frat boys and their Halo-and-Madden-playing ways, despite having a lot in common with them vis-à-vis not knowing how to interact with women) sites that usually substitute nihilistic misanthropy and misogyny for any sort of actual humor.  The worst is the sub-subculture of trolls revolving around sites like 4chan, people who not only get off on the dickery allowed them by online anonymity, but actually describe their own behavior as “internet eugenics,” as if that’s at all a good thing.  Some instances of troll behavior can be genuinely funny, albeit in small doses, but more often than not, it’s just disruption for the sake of inconveniencing others.  I don’t think I’ve ever taken part in a constructive, worthwhile message board discussion that wasn’t eventually hijacked by trolls, even if their behavior is often more innocuous and absurd than genuinely antagonistic.              Because of this unfortunate reality of internet culture, I found it sort of hard to accept the Fetish:Footage:Forum stuff in Pattern Recognition.  For some reason I can suspend my disbelief for the more outlandish thriller elements in Gibson’s books—the widely accepted rule number one of being a geek is that there is always room for ninjas on motorcycles, after all—but I found it distracting that the most disruptive flame wars on the Forum still ultimately boiled down to disputes about the footage itself.  In real life, it would be hard to ascertain anything about the footage, let alone actually working together to solve an epic mystery.  The forum would too easily devolve into a troll-infested circle jerk of in-jokes, exaggerated homophobic remarks, and fake-Situationist disruption tactics by people, imported from the darkest corners of the internet, who specialize in showing just how much they don’t care about whatever everybody else wants to talk about.  Despite my overall geekiness, I’m really glad that I can step away from the computer from time to time, awake with the realization that I’m one of the only people I know in real life who actually gives a shit about, say, the Final Cylon, or whether or not Wash’s death in Serenity was really necessary, or how inane that whole Spider-Man: One More Day fiasco was.  Internet culture, in short, makes me pretty happy that excessive geekiness is still a little bit unacceptable in real life.   1:  The late, lamented Perry Bible Fellowship was up there, and A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage Is Irreversible was something special for its woefully brief lifespan.  The best ones still running are Ryan North’s consistently funny dada experiment Dinosaur Comics and Chris Onstad’s Achewood, which I’d say is something of a high point for daily strip comics on the strength of dialogue, characterization, and incredibly bizarre plot arcs.  Too bad most webcomics are more like the inexplicably popular Ctrl+Alt+Del, which exemplifies everything potentially shitty about the medium.  It’s staggeringly, embarrassingly awful, and its creator doesn’t deserve the name “Tim Buckley.”  Now I can’t even hear “Song for the Siren” without having to think of this motherfucker’s slackjawed, expressionless cartoon monstrosities and stillborn—literally, in the sense that he tried to forge a serious plotline in his goddamned unfunny Wacky Gaming Webcomic by giving the female noncharacter a miscarriage—attempts at both pathos and humor. 2:  For instance, he can scarcely go through a day without dropping at least one reference to one of the aforementioned, or Mr. Show, The Venture Bros., Arrested Development, Futurama, or the Wu-Tang Clan, inadvertently creating a pop-cultural communications gulf between himself and most of the other people with the misfortune of having to deal with him. 3:  Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag now. 4:  I realize that this is complete armchair-level psychology, but I’m not sure that I really care. Current Mood: none, or other! Current Music: Fucked Up - Chemistry of Common Life (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
9:38 pm	thoughts on the Decline of Western Civilization A) This is probably the most appropriate, considering Darby Crash killed himself 28 years ago today, but the Germs seemed to embody a lot of what's fascinating/contradictory about punk. They were too inept to pass an audition to play one of the "Worst Bands in L.A." in Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke when they first got together, but ended up being one of the tighter, more awesome punk bands I can think of off the top of my head. They were a complete mess in the movie, especially the endless noise song "Shut Down," but still... Don Bolles is a great drummer, and Pat Smear typically did a great job incorporating strange trebly noise into coherent, catchy riffs. At the same time, Darby was--as is really obvious watching his parts in The Decline--pretty much as self-destructive as any fuck-up who's ever walked the Earth, which makes it interesting that his lyrics were actually pretty smart and literate a lot of the time. The funniest part of the movie for me (and actually pretty depressing in light of what ended up happening to Darby Crash) is when the subtitles come in under the Germs' "Manimal," and suddenly I realized that those were actually words coming out of his heroin-and-speed-and-alcohol-addled mouth, when he remembered to actually sing into the mic. Sad. B) Catholic Discipline sucked. I know Claude Bessy was one of the writers for Slash, and his interview was interesting. For some reason it's neat hearing displaced Europeans--in this case French or Belgian, but it also applies to the Scottish owner of the Masque as well as the Liverpudlian Repo Man/Sid and Nancy/Walker director Alex Cox--talk about being part of the L.A. punk scene. Nonetheless, his band sucked. All pretentious, empty nihilism yelled in a French accent over monotonous, midtempo, hookless dronepunk with too much synthesizer and not enough of the visceral rush that made most of the other bands great. C) The Alice Bag Band weren't all that great either, but were at least interesting as a sort of predecessor to the "deathrock" stuff that came up a little later. Pretty obvious that members of the band went on to join .45 Grave, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Damned, contributing to that classic/instantly dated "soundtrack to the Return of the Living Dead series and other 80s horror-comedies" sound. D) Naturally I liked X's part best, because they're one of my favorite bands ever. Another one of the funniest parts of the movie comes when Spheeris asks Billy Zoom how long he's been playing guitar, to which he replies--sort of neutrally smiling the entire duration of the scene--"Since I was six. Before that, I only played piano, violin, and accordion." (A minute later he wiggles his ears, apropos of nothing). Basically they (Zoom, John Doe, and Exene Cervenka) come across as pretty normal, self-aware people who also happen to be sort of drunk. But not Darby Crash drunk. Regular person drunk. D) The Circle Jerks were great, and I don't know why they didn't interview Keith Morris. Either way, Group Sex is a killer album for being less than 16 minutes long. It's interesting how much they and pre-Rollins Black Flag pretty much looked like typical suburban losers. That's probably why they didn't interview them, actually; if you want to sensationalize something, show how fucking insane the audience can be without talking to the actually-pretty-normal guys in the band afterward. E) Yeah, yeah, everybody knows Black Flag were awesome. I find it funny that this was made during the Ron Reyes era, even though it obviously makes chronological sense. Even though Ginn's style wasn't nearly as eccentric as it would get later on, it's pretty clear in the movie that they were not just another hardcore band. Also, seeing a Puerto Rican guy singing "White Minority" to get a rise out of Nazi punks: funny. F) Fear were AWESOME in this movie. I wish they had any albums nearly as good as the first, but this scene shows a lot of what made them great. Lee Ving is a hilarious caricature of a chauvinistic right-wing alcoholic gun nut, and the whole time the band is insulting the audience as much as they can. Musically: the greatest ultramasculine hardcore approximation of Devo ever, for what that's worth. Since watching this movie I've occasionally caught myself humming the chorus to "Let's Have a War": "There's so many of us there's so many of us there's so many There's so many of us there's so many of us there's so many....Let's have a war! [unnatural guitar bendy noise] It'll jack up the Dow Jones! Let's have a war! Blame it on the middle class! [and so on]" G) Sensationalistic though it might've been, The Decline (and American Hardcore, which is geographically more diverse but stylistically less so) pretty much reinforces my fascination with the 80s punk scene. I'm not sure why I have so much nostalgia for a subculture that probably would've terrified me had I been alive at the time. It's just really interesting watching stuff like this and Repo Man, listening to Damaged or Los Angeles or Adolescents or pretty much anything from that era, honestly, and wondering why there hasn't been that level of countercultural action this decade. You see these documents from the time and it makes the early 80s legitimately seem like a cultural warzone. We've got our blogosphere and our weaksauce Gang of Four imitations and I guess fullblown avant-garde noise if I feel like going extra-subcultural, but Jesus, this stuff was so much cooler.  Where are the edges and energy and anger and, like, rock?  And I say that knowing full well that I would have been beaten to death had I been a part of the L.A. scene. H [addendum])  I am currently the age Sid Vicious was when he died, very slightly younger than Darby Crash was when he died--not that either should ever be anybody's role model.  I am a college student with only an incredibly vague idea of a future that, if attained, will likely take a pretty long time.  I find this interesting because...well, I guess it's just narcissistic bullshit. Current Mood: distracted Current Music: Ennio Morricone, or it should be. That Leone paper is due in the morning. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
9:44 am	it has been like a year since I last posted here And that seems to be the case with a lot of you as well, but I feel like I should go ahead and post anyway. I feel like I have changed significantly, though on second thought I doubt I can elaborate on that in a way that makes sense. I'm not as prone to arbitrary bouts of anxiety and/or depression, I've pretty much lost all interest in recreational substance intake--okay, alcohol's still fun but I still haven't been inclined to drink it more than, say, once every month or two--and though I'm still unsure about, like, my actual future, I've sort of settled into a nice academic groove that I'm enjoying. Ultimately I can't really complain if my classes allow me to write final papers on, say, Once Upon a Time in the West as an example of the "baroque" phase of the western genre*, or on the anti-heroic, populist elements of punk rock**, and still give me good enough grades that I get to continue not really paying for school. I've got more "leisure" reading material piling up than I know what to do with--China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, M. John Harrison's Light, Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, and the first volume of Jaime Hernandez's Las Locas stories from Love and Rockets are the most recent additions--but I guess I should prioritize the Gibson first, if only because it doubles as required reading for one of my classes.  I am done working at CVS; now I'm at the CD Warehouse on Sandy Plains, kind of like Dick from High Fidelity with longer hair (or hair at all).  It's Halloween tomorrow, which means three things: I need to decide what horror movies I'm going to watch, I need to postpone reading that Gibson book because Lovecraft should take precedence right now, and I need to determine my costume for the party I'm attending on Saturday. It's been established that I can't wear a gimmicky non-costume this year--an "I Am Canadian" shirt does not equal a Neil Young costume, and drawing X's on my hands and saying I'm a straight-edge betrays a serious lack of dedication to the whole "Halloween" premise--so I'm probably going as the Dude from The Big Lebowski, though I've toyed with various Mr. Show characters nobody would recognize. Given a year to prepare, I might have gone with Mike Mignola's Lobster Johnson, or really any Mignola character with incandescent, perfectly round goggles. I think the Dude would be the easiest option, though. Hey! I get to vote in a presidential election! It's in suburban Georgia, sure. But still... On an almost-unrelated note, I wonder if Toby Keith fans think he's betrayed his audience by coming out and saying that he's been a Democrat this whole time.  On an even less-related note, I am baffled as to how the Butthole Surfers, Robert E. Howard, Ornette Coleman, Tobe Hooper, Townes Van Zandt, Wes Anderson, Jesse Custer, the Big Boys, Buddy Holly and/or Gary Busey, Bill Hicks, Pantera, Richard Linklater, Steve Earle, ZZ Top, Mike Judge (see the video for "Pantera," above), Scratch Acid, Willie Nelson, D.R.I., Roky Erickson, the Geto Boys, and our president's adopted persona can all be products of the same state.  Texas seems to me like more of a microcosm of all-American weirdness than a state; I guess that really applies to anyplace in the country if viewed a certain way, but it helps when the state in question is fucking huge.  That is most of what I have to say for today, but my asterisks above might have something to add. * I need to rewatch not only OUaTitW for this, but also The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and any number of John Ford/Anthony Mann/Nicholas Ray movies.  I don't have a problem with this, but my relatively scant amount of free time might frown upon needing to watch that many fairly long westerns. ** Counterarguments to my proposal include: Jello Biafra's weirdly offputting cult of personality, and the dream I had the other night in which Henry Rollins helped me a) find my way around a sort of Escape from New York-style fake NYC, and b) protect my family and friends from raving hyenas, lions, and Hellhounds--the latter of which spawned within the dream from a Slayer song that I don't think exists in reality--mostly by throwing tennis balls into the other room, an ideal distraction for any vicious predator. Current Mood: reflective Current Music: The Adolescents - Kids of the Black Hole (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
11:45 am	For all the talk about Gravity's Rainbow being unreadable/incomprehensible, it's pretty damn fun so far.  Even when I don't know what's going on I can still get off on the writing and the general weirdness of it.  That said, I'm not very far into it at all, so maybe I'll totally hit a brick wall at some point. It's funny that even though I didn't start listening to hip-hop until I was in high school, the sound of early 90s gangsta rap really gives me a sense of nostalgia for my childhood.  I guess The Chronic (and that sound in general) was so pervasive in pop culture when I was 5 that--even though I was only vaguely familiar with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube's names at the time, not even their music--that whole sound reminds me of elementary school.  Just like Nirvana and Soundgarden and Mortal Kombat and old episodes of The State and Beavis and Butthead.  I didn't really directly experience most of these things at the time, apart from one babysitter who was really into Nirvana and would occasionally watch MTV when he was over, so I find it funny how much I unconsciously absorbed early 90s pop culture.  I can't play GTA: San Andreas without feeling like a kid again, despite having never been to L.A. and (obviously) never having been in a street gang.  So here's the question: are there any trends in pop culture as dominant these days as that whole "Alternative Revolution" and hardcore hip-hop were from 91 to 95 or so?  Will the kids growing up today be able to feel nostalgic about things they only indirectly experienced, or is there no pop culture as monolithic as things tended to be before the internet blew our culture into tiny little fragments?  That's not necessarily a bad thing--I've heard that Soulja Boy bullshit (apparently a massive hit, I guess?) a few times but hardly enough  to remember what it sounds like--but the whole thing is weird to me.  It's strange growing up in a world where the idea of the Rock Star is taken for granted, only to find that it no longer really exists by the time you're an adult. Current Music: Ice Cube - AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 17th, 2007
10:44 pm	this is all I have to say right now that was the best movie the Coen Brothers have made in years, and it's honestly pretty surprising how long it took for them to figure out how well their sensibilities would fit with a Cormac McCarthy adaptation Current Music: Hüsker Dü - Eight Miles High (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
2:12 pm	totally hypothetical and unlikely but potentially amazing http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/42806-boredoms-put-out-call-for-77-drummers Basically, this Japanese band Boredoms--bizarro underground legends who throughout their career have evolved from insane spastic John Zorn noise to some of the most psychedelic music I've ever heard--is doing this free show in New York on July 7th, and they've asked for 77 drummers to show up and play with them.  That's seventy-seven drummers.  They are, you should be able to figure out, a very drum-heavy band, all circular krautrocky/tribal rhythms to anchor the insane stuff happening on top.  That's my birthday, and my family may or may not be going up north at some point this summer.  Eeee.  This isn't gonna happen, of course, but wouldn't that be cool as hell?  Drumming for Boredoms at the Brooklyn Bridge on my 20th birthday? On a less Jamey-had-an-unlikely-daydream note, it is summer and I am done with school for a few months.  Things definitely happening include going to court, Bonnaroo, moving into a house with Matt & Kyle, teaching myself a marimba solo piece to audition for Ensemble next semester, improving at drums (probably with actual lessons this time around), working, and hopefully recharging after a terrible, terrible semester.   Let's try to make the best of it, okay?  Let's not let this summer be like every other summer where I've told myself I was going to actually do things and instead ended up totally bored and sedentary the majority of the time. Current Mood: okay Current Music: Cheap Trick - High Roller [at Budokan] (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 12th, 2007
11:17 am	dammit Current Music: Low - Dragonfly (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 15th, 2007
6:47 pm	I was hoping to go to the TV on the Radio show at the Variety Playhouse in about a month, but apparently it's already sold out. So..I'm thinking of maybe going to the one at the 40 Watt in Athens--which is Thursday, April 12th--instead, because I don't think that one's sold out yet.  It's a smaller venue, the ticket price is about $5 less than at the Variety, you don't have to go through Ticketmaster to acquire said tickets (making it about $11-12 less than it would be in Atlanta), and, hey! It's presumably actually possible to still get tickets to that one at all, which is no longer the case in Atlanta. Now, my going is sort of contingent on whether or not anybody else wants to go, because I'm not driving all the way to Athens and back to see a concert by myself, so...if anybody else would like to go, that would kick ass.  Especially somebody from Atlanta/Marietta rather than Athens, just so I don't have to drive by myself.  I should add that they're supposedly pretty excellent live, and they don't really sound like anybody else out there right now, so regardless of whether or not you end up liking them they're worth checking out. Side note: it's cool how this album manages to be good, despite having the electric jug exposing it's own total lack of range as a musical instrument in every goddamned song. Current Mood: N/A Current Music: The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (4 Comments |Comment on this)
12:31 pm	ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Definitive 200 Albums of All Time as determined by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is clearly the most prestigious institution out there.  Thank you, you sweet, sweet Clevelandians for setting me straight regarding Kenny G and Avril Lavigne's places in the pantheon. But seriously though, it's kind of good for a laugh, or if you just don't have the money for that ipecac you've been wanting. ( This is definitely the worst list I've seen since Hit Parader's Top 100 Metal Vocalists of All Time ) Current Mood: amused Current Music: Fela Kuti - Confusion (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 1st, 2007
11:27 am	So I'm going to Bonnaroo this year. I was planning on saving up to do so by more or less leading a totally ascetic lifestyle this semester, but my parents arbitrarily decided to buy tickets for the entire family.  Which is kind of really kick-ass, as far as I'm concerned.  What would definitely make it cooler, though, is if some of my friends decided to go as well, because I don't really want to spend the entirety of Bonnaroo with my family (though it would be fun introducing them to the wonderments of some of the bands on display.  If none of them at least get a kick out of Ween live, I might have to disown them.).  But yeah.  You should go, even though it's really wicked expensive. Spring break next week.  This entails a) driving my brother and sister wherever they have to go because my parents are going to be out of town, b) working as many hours as the people at CVS want to schedule me, which I hope isn't all that many even if I'd like some extra money, c) going to Athens on Thursday, and d) writing a philosophy paper.  That's not really a spring break, but it at least involves not having my film class for one week.  Funny how the class that ought to be my favorite can become the one I most dread going to when there's a really lousy teacher. The weather's been really nice over the last few days.  I think I might have had some sort of seasonal affective disorder thing going on, because as it's gotten sunnier and warmer I've been feeling significantly happier and more lucid.  I dunno.  It's interesting how something like that can affect your mental/emotional state.  Or maybe it's completely unrelated and I'm seeing a causal relationship that's not actually there.  Whatever. Current Mood: good Current Music: SEX BOMB BABY YEAH [Flipper - Sex Bomb] (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
2:02 pm	T-rex on poker The alt-text comment for that, by the way, is "ATTENTION PROFESSIONAL POKER PLAYERS: you will crumble before the might of this new poker face.  you will spill your drink on your lap.  these two events are unrelated, but you will never be able to prove it." The e-mail link comment is "god sees hilariously sucky poker playing in the future.  should be pretty good?" Current Mood: pretty good actually Current Music: The Evens - If It's Water (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
10:01 pm	so on Thursday, March 8th I am going to Athens to see Isis, Jesu, and Torche (arty/doomy/drony/sludgy/posty metal bands) at the 40 Watt. Directed towards UGA people: anybody up for hanging out before or after that?  I'd ask if any of you wanted to go but don't really remember any of you being into that kind of stuff.  Mostly a) I never see most of my friends who go to UGA, and b) I highly doubt I'll feel like driving back to Atlanta from Athens in the middle of the night after a metal show (though I could, if it came to that). Just kinda...just throwing that out there, I guess. And I have some sort of cold-like illness.  Earlier I coughed up a bit of phlegm that looked like an alien foetus, and I've been rather shell-shocked ever since, to be honest.  Hopefully it'll be gone within a couple days, as these things usually are, but until then it's hard for me to fall asleep or do anything or eat without food tasting like bark and making my throat itch accordingly. Eh. ( Also, those Onion guys are still pretty amazing ) Current Mood: sick Current Music: The For Carnation - Tales [Live from the Crypt] (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007
10:58 pm	I'm not sure what's the worst possible way to spend a Valentine's Day, but I'd be willing to bet money that staying in my room by myself and watching as much of the Star Wars Holiday Special as I can stand before getting physically ill is pretty close to the top of the list. I had to stop after seeing a frighteningly coked-up Carrie Fisher save the special from an unbearable--and completely unrelated to Star Wars in any way whatsoever--musical sequence triggered by Chewbacca's father getting some sort of New Age-y virtual reality porno machine as a Life Day present.  Holy christ it's an abomination.  I'm going to watch the Venture Bros. now instead, but I do have to make myself finish it some other time (I wouldn't be a Star Wars fan if I wasn't willing to endure the worst piece of shit I've ever seen for the historical significance of Boba Fett's first appearance).  This is just a guess, but I'd imagine intoxication would make this significantly easier to tolerate.  But yeah...happy fuckin' Valentine's Day, everybody. Current Mood: okay Current Music: Grizzly Bear - Yellow House (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 11th, 2007
10:51 pm	looks like there's a new semester afoot And I'm trying to figure out what to do with it.  Watching [the new] Battlestar Galactica on DVD and obsessively spending most of my Christmas money on more volumes of The Invisibles seems like a good start, I guess.  Oh, and getting a (probably) shit job for weekends so I have money.  CVS, starting Saturday.  I don't look forward to working, but I sure as hell look forward to being able to look at upcoming concerts and not have to immediately settle for "catching them next time around," or go into CD or comic stores and not always leave empty-handed.  That should be enormously satisfying.  Also, we have a new roommate, who seems nice and actually makes an active effort to communicate, which is more than any of the rest of us could be arsed to do at any point last semester.  This is a good thing, really.  As far as I'm concerned it's nice to be able to go into your room and not feel the warm glow of isolation all over the place. Oh, yeah...regarding the "upcoming concerts," Yo La Tengo is playing the Variety on February 3rd (a Saturday) and I just found out about it, so those of you who are into that sort of thing (smart, melodic, eclectic indie rock band who's been around for about 20 years and really great for about 15 of those), drop me a comment or something.  I want to go to this thing pretty badly, but not by myself (I mean, I will if I have to, but that's never nearly as pleasurable an experience as it should be). Music I've been listening to the last few days includes Juju by Siouxsie and the Banshees (whom I'm finding were way better than you would assume pretty much any band as gothy as them to be), Absence by Dälek (fucking insane avant-garde hip-hop with musical backdrops like Kevin Shields, the Bomb Squad, and Jim Foetus crashing decrepit, abrasively loud cars into each other over and over again in the best way possible), Exploded Drawing by Polvo, and Laughing Stock by Talk Talk (whose late material tends to come up every week or two for me, really). That aside, the percussion pool audition went better than I expected (I didn't really fuck up at all, contrary to what I would expect myself to do in any audition, really).  He couldn't actually put me in the Percussion Ensemble because I'm not a percussion major (and in order for me to make it instead of one of them, I'd have to do significantly better than a student whose primary course of study is playing percussion), so I'm in the Wind Orchestra, I guess. I would assume this will entail more interesting stuff than high school band, and I look forward to actually playing music again.  My schedule as of now--and probably permanently, because I can't really change it after tomorrow evening--includes the following: Astronomy 1020 French 1001 (because I needed another class, and I need a foreign language credit, and I already have studied French, but have forgotten most of it by now.  I don't look forward to this class.). Great Questions of Philosophy (Special Section.  My Critical Thinking teacher last semester recommended me for this, which is I guess a more discussion-oriented, smaller class than most, and taught by an actual doctor of philosophy rather than a grad student). Wind Orchestra Film Aesthetics.  I think my Film Aesthetics teacher might actually be retarded (more likely she just has no clue what she's talking about). ( AIM conversation excerpt about this person ) Lame.  Whatever.  The music, philosophy, money, and my various hobbies should help me remain sane, I think.  In the meantime, looks like I'm off to see what Commander Adama and friends are up to this time, thus furthering my gradual, profoundly distressing devolution into Comic Book Guy. Current Music: Dälek - Culture for Dollars (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 25th, 2006
1:43 pm	In the UK, they have chocolate bars called "Yorkie"s, which are packaged like this. On the other side, it says "Do Not Feed the Birds!" I got one in my stocking--having Scottish relatives ensures that I will get bizarre candy I've never seen before on a pretty regular basis--and now I feel like a horrible misogynist. I also got that Tom Waits Orphans set, Bark Psychosis' ///Codename: Dustsucker, volume 1 of The Invisibles by Grant Morrison et al, season 1 of the Battlestar reimagining that's way better than most other sci-fi shows I can think of, volume 1 of Preacher by Garth Ennis et al, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and Freedom Force Vs. the Third Reich for PC.   Materialism is especially fun on Christmas when you have no income and therefore can't actually buy yourself many luxury goods at all throughout the year. Current Mood: good Current Music: Bark Psychosis - From What Is Said to When It's Read (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 24th, 2006
8:10 pm	this has probably been said by someone I don't know before, but it bears repeating Marquee Moon should've been in Guitar Hero II instead of Free Bird, or at least to sort of counterbalance it in the "11-minute dual-guitar jam" category Current Music: Television (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
1:43 pm	I'm trying out for the GSU Percussion Ensemble at the start of next semester. Apparently they (we, hopefully?) are playing a Steve Reich festival at the Rialto in April or May or something, so I decided to check out some of his stuff. I'd been somewhat acquainted with some of his stuff from taking Music Theory I in Florida--I think "Clapping" was the name of the piece we talked about--and I knew he was considered a serious pioneer of contemporary music, but never really listened to him that much. What I'm getting at here is that Music for 18 Musicians is really great. It really reminds me of Tortoise--especially a couple songs off TNT ("Four Day Interval" and "Ten Day Interval," I think)--and it's cool in that the constant repetition makes it really hypnotic and mesmerizing, but if you pay attention, there's a lot of stuff going on at any moment. I'm not well-versed enough in Theory or classical in general to really, you know, analyze a piece of classical music, but I can safely say this is really unique, enjoyable music (based on everything I've heard, at least). It sounds to me kind of like gamelan music or something else that I'm not nearly educated enough about to describe well. I might also just like it when music puts heavy emphasis on mallet percussion--it being my area of expertise and everything--but still. Cool. Needless to say, I really want to make the ensemble (because it's been really long since I've had the opportunity to seriously take part in playing music aside from lamely attempting to drum along with whatever music I'm listening to at the time). I'm very out of practice, but the audition music doesn't look terribly hard; as long as I can gain access to some mallet instruments over winter break and I don't choke on the audition, I should be fine. I hope so, at least. As tired as I was of high school band by the time I graduated (due to the barrage of other aspects of it that were, frankly, lame as hell), I really miss the feeling of exhilaration from working on a piece of music until suddenly I get it and it feels like second nature to me, then listening to the way it clicks in with everything else going on. Sadly, due to the near-total lack of percussion ensemble stuff going on there at the time, there weren't nearly enough of those moments aside from Pit, and way too many completely identical-sounding marches and ballads where I got to, say, play triangle while the piccolo soloed for about a million bars. The point being that despite all of that it would really be a shame to totally abandon that part of my life; somebody as completely obsessed with music as I am really needs to be playing it in some capacity other than by myself in my parents' basement. Current Mood: hopeful Current Music: Steve Reich - Drumming (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006
12:53 am	I have a paper due Thursday. I hate having a total lack of initiative when it comes to writing 3-5 analyses of arguments that I don't care about in the least. I guess I'll just have to essentially strap myself to Microsoft Word for the majority of tomorrow afternoon. In other, semi-related news, I've had a whole lot of trouble falling asleep lately and I don't know why. It's making school--and trying to focus on writing totally uninteresting papers--kind of unpleasant because I'm fucking tired all the time. Incidentally, I just realized that I Could Live in Hope (by Low) is a really great album title. It's a pretty nice turn of phrase that fits the music perfectly, in its way. I'd elaborate but I'm tired and I really don't feel like it right now. Current Mood: none, or other: Current Music: Low - Lazy (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 26th, 2006
11:40 pm	well I seem to have recently found myself in a remarkably similar emotional place to where I was for a good portion of last year (particularly the pre-college segment of it). Even if I'm not entirely happy, I'm not depressed so much as completely confused about a variety of things that feel staggeringly important (regardless of how important they actually are). Which really makes this fairly interesting, I guess, at least more than the months on end I spent mostly being fairly detached from anything, lacking real emotional investment. Now, of course, I don't even really know what I'm emotionally invested in, but it feels like there's something for me to give a damn about, which is nice, I guess? anyway I guess I really have no clue where I'm going with this, so that's all for now Current Mood: unsure Current Music: Brian Eno - Another Green World (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 27th, 2006
12:46 am	Criminal Records thing ( kind of long-ish chronicle of what I did tonight, including concert, stand-up, and random occurrences ) Current Mood: seriously fuckin' tired Current Music: quiet (2 Comments |Comment on this)