I Don't Understand

Geert Wilders is speaking at a "Free Speech Forum" here at school tonight. I'm going, but I feel kinda funny about it.

It's definitely going to be interesting. As far as I know, Wilders: is in the Dutch Parliament representing the Freedom party, opposes immigration and made a short film called "Fitna" that shows footage from various terrorist attacks alongside passages from the Koran, in his mind connecting all of Islam with senseless violence. I don't necessarily disagree with this notion of Islamofascism that Geert describes... Iran is an Islamic Republic with fascist tendencies, for example. I don't think the term applies to all of Islam, widely recognized as a religion that actively promotes peace, like just about every other religion. A lot of people here are saying his rhetoric is hateful and hate speech isn't free speech... I don't really agree with that. He's espousing a political belief that's opposed to extreme Islam. Uhhh I dunno, I'm not very good at writing about these things.

I support Temple in not canceling the event tonight. And I'm glad people have the right to and will be protesting outside Anderson Hall. I support them too. Which is why I feel funny. I think people are missing the point: no matter what you choose to do tonight, you're exercising your right to free speech. Just don't do nothing!!!

Funny things that can only happen at a single sex Catholic school... GO.

I've been up all night. I've done a great job of avoiding all nighters up til tonight. I've done all that I can to avoid writing much more of this paper that's due in 2.5 hours. It's ok though, I'm going to get it done. Kate Chopin, don't worry: I will make sure my Prof knows why I think you were writing about gender more than anything else.

My mind is so jagged right now that I watched this video and my stomach started churning out of nervousness for Ellen Paige's well being in this video:

I feel like this library job will be LIFECHANGING.

At The Library

Wouldn't it be cool if I had a job at the library? We'll find out tomorrow!

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, or, Universal Studios You're Stomping All Over my Imagination

I am completely against this

Green Light, 7-11

I saw U2 last Thursday night at the Meadowlands. Even though it was a spontaneous occurrence, it still felt kinda routine -- U2 are a family favorite and there will be an attempt to see them on every tour. Like, I wasn't surprised I was seeing them, even though I didn't know I was seeing them until two days before the show.

The show, though, was far from routine. The last two U2 tours have been about making arenas feel like clubs by using a really cool theater-in-the-round thing to bring the audience in. On the Elevation Tour, it was the heart-shaped stage. On the Vertigo Tour, it was an enormous, white O. The 360 Tour brought the music outside, under an enormous claw/spaceship/crab.
I just thought I'd share some observations from the night.

There was some Popmart-like detachment from the audience. I don't know if it was the claw, the selections from the new album or the scale of the whole thing... the show was more about the music's interaction with the elaborate stage than with the crowd. I was kind of taken aback at first, but by the end of the show, I was pretty into it. It was a spectacle and I really liked that they changed the game up a little bit. The setlist could've used some tweeking, though. Like on the last tour, I loved the inclusion of weirder, early cuts like "An Cat Dubh" and "Out of Control." And everyone's been noting the lack of cuts from Zooropa and Achtung Baby. And not that I wanted it, but they didn't even play "Pride." I think they lost everyone at least once during the set. For example, they played this remix of "I Know I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" that had them wandering around the stage with bongos and stuff... everyone was trying to figure out what was going on, if they were even performing the song live. And of all songs to follow this little dance party with, they picked "Sunday Bloody Sunday."
I'm wondering when the tour will come where we start hearing the unheralded songs from All That You Can't Leave Behind live again, like "Wild Honey." And "Yahweh" was such an amazing closer on the last tour, I wish they could have held onto it for this tour. Instead they left us with "Moment of Surrender," a perfectly AWESOME song from the new record but it's a really momentum and mood killer and didn't have me begging for another encore. Speaking of last tour, they also had opened the first encore with a pretty unbeatable selection of songs from Achtung like "The Fly," complete with Zoo Tv graphics and all that shit. It was tons of fun to see, I wouldn'tve minded experiencing that sort of thing again.
HOWEVER: It's great to still have "Walk On" as a centerpiece of the show. And they opened the second encore with "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)." Jesus Christ. Honestly it brought me to tears, that song harbors so much pain and to have Bono swinging from a microphone in front of 80,000 people, singing that bridge...wow. It was really good to have that song back in rotation for the first time since 1993.

I can't believe we didn't get "Your Blue Room"



Ahhhh the melancholy all over that record!! It drove me crazy in sixth grade lol.

This Stella video is so good for the changing season:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Is There a Reason for this Sentimental Streak?

My "apartment" feels a lot more lived in after this weekend. Thanks friends for leaving pillows, sleeping bags, backpacks and most of all, for being such good friends. Seriously. This place gets so alienating.

My Sunday afternoon looked something like this:

Although Be Happy Fest boasted a bill of 10 bands, only two were worth caring too much about and out of those two, I'd already seen one. That left Teenage Cool Kids, easily my favorite band of the last year. Apparently only allotted 20 minutes for whatever reason, they played at least 50, to a packed basement. The epicness of their new record, the must-hear Foreign Lands, translated remarkably well live and their older material was predictably scream-and-pogo worthy (totally a good thing.) More on them later, at this location

Temple Towers Blues

Was this place built in a fucking day?

There's no way they spent more than a day working in each one of these rooms. Sure it looks nice but the seams between the floor panels are blistering, the paint on the walls is still tacky and our bathroom has major drainage issues.

I just took a shower and by the time I stepped out, the water was up past my ankles. Our toilet has been filled to the brim with brown shit water since Thursday. Plunging proves useless. Every time you tried to flush it literally did the opposite: a column of toilet juice would rise out of the middle.

At least I can put a hot pot on the granite (granite?!?) countertops and they wont crack or melt. But seriously, how much am I paying for those granite countertops?

-Wishing I lived off campus. But I'm glad I'm in the company of friends in 207 and 212.

Also, living on the 12th street side of the Towers has given me the inspiration for a drinking game. Twelfth street boasts a bike lane and it's extremely busy most daylight hours. I propose we sit in front of the big window in the common area and take a shot for every bike that goes by. Double shot if it's a fixie. Triple if it's someone going the wrong way.

Sorry, But This Is Too True

I hate being the "fuck MTV!"-guy like I was last night. Usually I enjoy watching the VMAs. MTV was ballsy in coming up with a music video award show. They had a sense of humor about it. Over the years though, MTV and the nominees have become alarmingly sincere about the whole thing. Rather than seeking critical acclaim or furthering their artistic merit via video, the "artists" have settled into making the same old bullshit dance-party-movie-shit fuckery. I don't really know how to describe it. Last night was just so unzeitgeisty but even so supposedly millions of people were twittering about Kanye's Taylor Swift diss and Lady GaGa's absurd outfits. I had to ask the same cliched question as millions of other uptight white male music conniseurs: who the fuck cares? Nirvana, and Krist Novoselic in particular actually, said it best in 93:

No Escape

Started out the day listening to Oyster Boy on my way to Intro to Advertising with the nervously foreign and always sweet Jin Seong Park. Oyster Boy is Zach Lamalfa, formerly of Spider Geometry, and, currently, ringleader of Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting. Hoe Avenue are incredible, but spread across the country. Zach has taken the angry shitgaze he made with Gavin Thomas and Tom Melton this summer and made it personal. His "The Waterfront Cassette Tape Cassette" is a fucking BRASH piece of music; one guy's hate for stupid friends, stupid music, stupid towns, stupid books... stewed in New York City with some elegant literary references. It's Dylanesque like War On Drugs is Dylanesque but instead of offering us a meandering, nuclear but optimistic future, Oyster Boy hands us a stagnant, pissed off present. Choice line: "I'm gone, fuck you." As a human being, Zach is smart and funny; as a musician, I think he uses his talent sparingly and to great effect. This solo effort could easily have been too stripped down for its own good but it's very complete with potential to be timeless. You can download the record for free on the Oyster Boy Myspace right now and John Crodian will be putting "Cassette" on cassette as, I think, the first release for his new label High and Gay.

I had to pick my mood up with the Spraynard demo. It's about a hundred blog years old by now but still holds up. I think they're almost done their full-length. This summer, they toured fucking England which is more than your band can say. I kind of took them for granted the last time I saw them, sometime in June, but I miss them and I'm totally bummed they're not playing many shows until December at least. I had a dream last week that they appeared on TV and the host of the show said they were from Bucks County. Totally wrong.

DO U KNW THE ENMY?

I don't think many of my peers would argue with me when I say that Green Day has lost their touch. I feel like anyone that isn't an aging rock critic or musically-naive, "rock and roll"-loving listener that came of age with American Idiot and The Black Parade pretty much agrees. The problem with Green Day now is, after the success of American Idiot, they've quit coming up with new ideas. I mean, maybe this is the position they were in during the mid-90s, feeling stuck finding three chords and penning another poetic ode to drug addiction/masturbation/being a desperate loser. But then there was Warning a FUCKING GREAT record, Green Day "growing up" and using acoustic guitars for the greater good (simple songs, not coffee shop drivel,) and writing Ray Davies-esque stories about your average masochist or paradegoer or loner or whatever. For some reason, they couldn't figure out how to continue in this vein... Maybe in the four years they spent working on a follow-up, during which they had all their demos stolen, they no longer felt relevant? Did they think Warning was too low-key? I don't think they wanted to be relegated to the backburner yet, but THEY SHOULD HAVE LET IT HAPPEN. Green Day could have went on as a great little cult-y club band, making GREAT records with regularity and consistency and touring mid-size venues every year. THEY WERE FUCKING OPENING FOR BLINK 182 IN 2002. American Idiot probably started off as a really fun experiment to, I guess from what I gather, rework their songwriting process. They were still writing story songs; just, they now had a political bent too average for the Bush era, and they were nine fucking minutes long. Even when it came out, it was a great listen. I don't think any of us minded, these songs were catchy. The ballads even were a nice touch. But somehow, the masses, the preteen, MTV (post-music video MTV) weened, middle school angst ridden masses and their dads too, latched on. My sister and I noticed a huge shift during Green Day's tour for Idiot. We saw them shortly after the album's release in late September at the Liacouras center. The place seats maybe 8,000 people and if it was sold out, it was only just. The crowd on the floor were the punx from way back, us who grew up with Y100 and our older siblings Green Day CDs. There was a circle pit. There was crowd surfing. Green Day's set showcased the new songs in a pretty low key way while the old songs were given top billing, pretty much filling the late half of the set and all the encore. When we saw them a few months later in Atlantic City, once again on the floor, there was a markedly different feeling, feelings that I pick up at shows more and more each month actually. The crowd was uptight preteens and their parents and their dumb boyfriends and Green Day pulled out all the stops for the new songs and I think "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was the first song of the first Encore. We couldn't start a circle pit because there wasn't enough support to shut up the whining of the too-delicate children in attendance. Very little fun was had that night. But I think Green Day wanted to cash in on this no fun thing because once again they're realeasing a bloated fucking "concept album" that says huge things about the society we live in today and makes sweeping statements about religion and the machine and the dogs that run it and its protagonists are CHRISTIAN and GLORIA FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. When did they get so sincere? It's hard not to think that the Green Day of 1994 would be making fun of the Green Day of 2009, the eyeliner donning blonde hair dyed charicatures of themselves that are making shit "art" out of dumb overdone concepts. I don't even think the shitty preteens are listening anymore, just the old rock critics judging by the reviews from newspapers and AllMusic, the ultimate proprietors of musical medocrity.

Q102

Just took a spinning class. My oh my! It was intense.

I decided I'm going to try to live in my bathrobe as much as I can for the rest of the school year.

Oh, My Happy Medium

Since it's "beach season" I think it's time to start thinking about my awful eating habits (the aforementioned pregaming for dinner,) total lack of exercise, and enormous gut. What I want to do, with bike riding and cutting my meals down from five a day to three (plus two small snacks,) is find a happy medium with my gut: see I like my gut. I lack definition and I love it. I don't like how I look pregnant kinda, with my boobs verging on an a-cup. So I want to take my gut in, see if my 34 waistline is still there underneath the grilled cheeses and shamrock shakes...but leave the jiggle.

New Adventures in Public Transportation

I'm sitting in the J and H basement smooshed between two bodies, waiting for midnight pancakes. Bring your own fork! What the fuck? Whatever. This post is about my night.

Danielle asked me earlier if I had ever been to the Melting Pot. I said no. She decided that we would go...tonight. To feast on apples and cauliflower and cheese! Molten, gooey, cheese, melted tableside. Because roughly half of what we do together is eat, I thought it was a great idea. We pregamed in the J and H cafeteria. I think Danielle and I are the only people that pregame for dinner. Then we hopped on the subway down to City Hall, got disoriented in that stupid fucking concourse that goes from city hall to godknowswhere down Market Street. Holy shit. Anyway, melting pot defied my expectations. It seemed like much ado about nothing - carrots, bread, apples and glorious cheese! That part, actually, was awesome, and of course there is the chocolate fondue dessert. Which... well you know, it's melted chocolate and tasty sweet, um... "dippers." Awesome. Ducked into a hotel bathroom like we owned the place, then looking for City Hall Station and/or the C bus, we saw, across JFK boulevard, a white and red school bus. It was the Temple Loop Bus Jawn which we've never taken... so we used our status as students at this great univ. for a free bus ride. It was weird: the driver went through Chinatown and stuff, this really circuitous route until we wound up back on Broad at Vine Street. But it was great to be back on a schoolbus.

Mixes Made During High School, For High School, About High School by High Schoolers

My friend Allison and I had an amazing, three-volume mix exchange going on between my sophomore and senior year. One of them had Phoenix's "Second to None." I picked up their disc, It's Never Been Like That, and, um, loved it, I guess. Their new song, if you haven't heard yet, is gold.

El is for the Way You Look at Me

Starting out fresh.



So about a month ago I called this 302 number about sub-letting with them this summer... it turned out to be the awkward girl with the purple hair. I was OK with the idea but then after a few weeks of no phone calls from her I decided to make other plans. Then I realized the idea of living with the purple haired girl to begin with was freakin' stupid. Now she's calling me every ten minutes so I can look at the apartment and I don't wanna go!

Going to see I Love You Man instead. So excited.

This is my new blog.

"With a fart, I let out steam."